My father was still a child when Bob Marley shot the sheriff. My father was a child but the land beneath our feet is old, older than time, time doesn’t feel real on either side. The sheriff was shot and our land still bleeds but it is an older blood that rises from the under the ground, crusty blood around fisherwomen’s ankles. The blood lines their wrists and the comes out of their mouths and the middle of their heads. It is virgin blood. Virgin blood like the blood that came out of John Lennon’s gun wound when young Sid was dying of overdose, it was the middle of the 80s when the holy Virgin came back to earth with a blessing from the Devil for us and an album that went platinum three times. In the middle of the 80s my mother got her first period and her sister had a poster of Michael Jackson on the wall. My mother taught me how to bite my tongue inside my mouth and swallow my screams back inside my stomach, but the blood seeps out from between my lips and I don’t know how to stop it, I have been speaking in a language that is not my own. Our mouths ache with unspoken words, the bones of strife are buried deep in our soil. Our soil is red with the blood of the land and our mouths bleed, but time isn’t real and has been buried for so long that we have forgotten, we only know of love from arthouse films and full moon fever dreams. In the beginning of the 90s Freddie Mercury died of AIDS. I wish we didn’t have to think about dying all the time but our land is lined with dead bodies from the 1943 famine, it must be terrible thing to die of hunger but we were born on the wrong side of the world, you see. We never learned to measure time on this side. But what does it matter, time isn’t real and the world is going to end anyway. I will live a good life and die like Elvis, with a seizure on a bathroom floor.
