Like Knowing a Secret

No Malice: Where Is Your Brother? – Starring Jasmine Mans, click here:

My response: I loved that poem. I loved how it wasn’t that straightforward. And I loved, as Guy Harrelson said, that it wasn’t about one’s specific brother, but about all brothers. I thought of a bumper sticker the other day that said: “I am related to you; treat me accordingly.” And I passed a brother, who was carrying a sign: “Anything will help,” and he came to me when I looked at him with a “get up from there and come over” look. I gave him money. He was near a freeway on-ramp and he was in red and he was a good-looking brother and he touched my hand and when he spoke, he was articulate and good. I felt bad that I just went up the on-ramp with the excuse that there were others behind me, or that the car was already full. I thought he might have thought that I was gay and that I wanted to pick him up, but I am not gay, just full of life and I was helping people lift heavy loads into the back of their SUVs under the auspices of protecting their backs, and at first they wondered what I was after. But, just as soon as I had helped them, I was on my way. I had been collecting two sets of dishes for my sister, who said she needed them but didn’t know which ones to buy. I keep telling myself that we are all related and that I should have gone back and taken that man home and just let him feel that he was free, that I was willing to trust everything to him to prove that he came before my feelings of security because my security depended on him. If he wasn’t secure then how in the hell could I be secure? It’s going to be like that soon. As the rich-poor gap widens, we are all going to fall in. And I know what its like to be rich, and all I wanted to be was like the other guys. That’s the thing about being like everyone else. You can empathize. And that empathy is like knowing a secret.

Journalism is Dead; Truth is on Trial

If someone were to ask me why I wrote, “The Ticking Bomb,” (See: https://savioni.wordpress.com/2013/07/04/the-ticking-bomb/) it is because my back is against the wall. The fact that nothing is sacred reflects my ego and the times. I have nothing but my reality to share or barter for the hope of a real job, this streaming video of my life, the unadulterated view.

Truth is on trial, the sacredness of one’s mother, the grossness and her disintegration, my own naked ambition to titillate and to question: Am I a good son as some have mentioned? There’s simply nothing left. I have stood before the burning car and offered not to help. I have carefully crafted the view of death and so shall my own be made the spectacle, in effect, to show others what not to say.

But there is no stone unturned in our open lives, where apparently every word is recorded for later incrimination. You’d be wise to check your words because big brother is watching. He is at your ear listening, determining your psychology, and seeing if you’ll tick like the last few seconds before you self-radicalize.

The truth is at stake in this age of open-sources. Every line of code is played and edited, so that the program of social contract doesn’t crash. The activists are taken out of the equation. In the end, no one in power wants the truth since they are holding the cards.

It has already been established that if you have all the money the game is over. At this point, I’ll have to shoot you because there is no other hand.

I slump over my last call like a man who has expended all his energy and resources. I work as a servant to the well connected.

Inevitably, it gets down to whom you know, and every member of most families is poor. They barter their arms and their legs and when those are gone, they barter each other.

I am trapped by what I should do as a son. I am trapped by what I must do as a member of society. I have no money to rescue my mother, myself. These are truly the last days, the open pleading to be spared, where everything that has been asked has been given.

I am lying here waiting for them. It is so quiet you can hear a pin drop or the clock ticking.