My academic managers would scoff at that title. There are no lay-offs in academia, and no one ever gets fired. No, no. In academia, the University does not elect to rehire you to instruct another course. They use wordy sentence construction like that all the time. My most recent notice went something like this:
Tags: Charles Bivona, charlesbivona.com, Jersey Poet
Working on my dissertation is pushing me over an economic cliff, and I am not too proud to ask for help. Suggested Donation: $1 to $5
By Charles Bivona : I’m so exhausted with these gluttonous, hoarding billionaires waltzing around my society with impunity, with this attitude: Well, I’m certainly not going to apologize for my success.
A small ribbon of water ran down the side of a hill, past a well near my grandmother’s house. I was playing with my cousins. Their callow hands roamed over snow-blown bark, frozen grass and packed snow.
They lived in holes, trenched in desperation before the newest WMD—the German Machine Gun. The German bunkers were well-built and well-supplied. German soldiers sat, waited for an English head to pop up, just for a peak, and then…
By Charles Bivona | I was supposed to be following my breathing. I was supposed to stare at this white wall—“the emptiness of it”—and silently “count my breaths.” Simple Zazen: Breath in and count one. Breath out and count two. When you reach ten, begin at one again. I was supposed to sit on this hard buckwheat pillow, legs in a half-pretzel pose, and learn to ignore what the Zen Master called my monkey mind—“always fidgeting around!”
A Cultural View by Reverend Manny
I’m no political pundit. I’m just a poet who became a cultural historian by accident. Seriously, I tripped into this life. And from my perspective, the U.S. seems poised to make the same mistake it made in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. Our government is poised to focus more on U.S. financial interests than on the will of Egyptian people—the families on the streets of Cairo. We are poised to be the bad guys on the wrong side of history, again. But we do have a choice.
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