“All the world’s a stage” where we play different roles and parts, “men and women merely players” (Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II Scene VII, Lines 1-2). The stages of life (infancy, childhood, lover, soldier, judge, old age, and return to childhood “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything,” line 28) are indeed…
I believe that one of the most important parts of being human is having personal identity (PI). And part of being human in today’s world means experiencing an unprecedented influx of artificial intelligence (AI). It is the thesis of this article that these two categories will inevitably meld together into a third category—what Andrea M….
It is well known that the Sandinistas were funded and trained in Cuba under Che Guevara and Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution as well as being indirectly funded by the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev. This training commenced in the ’60s and the war officially ended on July 19, 1979, when Somoza’s army surrendered. The Sandinistas—led…
This poem was inspired by a poem written by my dear friend, Jerome Gastaldi, whom you may know as Bob Abbott. The last stanza starts . . . Some do not want to know. For the pain of knowing Is the death Of their illusion. —Jerome Gastaldi Riding the train. A pane of glass is…
The first masked man provokes the captive: “Any last words before I separate your skull from your body?”
If you know me, then you know how much I love spoken word poetry and song lyrics. Creative lyrics–by disparate bands from two different songs separated by three decades–come to mind. In chronological order, the first music group is the American rock band known as The Doors, who everyone has heard of, from Generation Xers…
The withering of the imagination to the point of poetic impotency at the hands of reason (logos) clad knowledge-seekers during the epoch of the Enlightenment left a void in its philosophical wake. But as we know from experience, human nature has a way of redressing itself by swinging the proverbial pendulum back toward what it…
The effect of the Enlightenment bifurcated not only faith and reason but also imagination and knowledge. “[S]ome philosophers of the Enlightenment thought that image and imagination simply clouded and obscured the pure dry knowledge that they were after” (Guite, Faith, Hope and Poetry, 2). This was done in vast contrast to the age when fables,…
Nathanael grabs the spear. He shuts his left eye to place his prey in his cross-hairs, then releases the javelin with Odyssean accuracy. But the creature parries. The spear gets stuck in the heart of a warrior in a painting that the king had commissioned 15 years prior.
A woman coughs up blood in the ICU at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles where her husband stands next to her bed, rubbing her back, helping her expel pink phlegm into his handkerchief. At a table for two, at nearby diner, a deep voice punctuates the greasy air that smells of Saturday Night’s Special:…