A Brief History of Seven Killings

by Marlon James

When you’re dead speech is nothing but

It should read “when you’re dead, ...” no comma was addd

I could listen to myself, still claiming to anybody that would hear that I didn’t fall, I was pushed over the balcony at the Sunset Beach Hotel in Montego Bay.

Dead people never stop talking and sometimes the living hear.

To be dead is to understand that dead is not gone, you’re in the flatness of the deadlands. Time doesn’t stop. You watch it move but you are still,

Living people wait and see because they fool themselves that they have time. Dead people see and wait.

she’s scared of nightfall because that’s when the rats come for her good toes.

This is a story of several killings, of boys who meant nothing to a world still spinning, but each of them as they pass me carry the sweet-stink scent of the man that killed me.

and I see seven people in one room and one pregnant and people fucking anyway because people so poor that they can’t even afford shame and I wait.

every time you reach the edge, the edge move ahead of you like a shadow until the whole world is a ghetto, and you wait.

Preacher says there is a god-shaped void in everybody life but the only thing ghetto people can fill a void with is void.

The dream didn’t leave, people just don’t know a nightmare when they right in the middle of one.

And killing don’t need no reason. This is ghetto. Reason is for rich people. We have madness.

Police only have to see that me don’t have no shoes before he say what the bloodcloth you nasty naiggers doing ’round decent people, and give me two choices.