A four-time honoree in the Allen Ginsberg Awards, R. Bremner has been writing of incense, peppermints, and the color of time since the 1960s, in nine books/chapbooks, and hundreds of journals and anthologies including International Poetry Review, Paterson Literary Review, The Journal of Formal Poetry, Red Wheelbarrow, Oleander Review, seventeen jazz poems in Jerry Jazz Musician, and Climate of Opinion: Sigmund Freud in Poetry. His eBook Mirrors, from Grandview University, is available free of cost from the author. Ron appeared in the legendary first issue of Passaic Review in 1979 along with Ginsberg, Laura Boss, and a plethora of sanguine young poets.
Mega
You have an ego the size of a small planet.
You have to win at everything.
But there is no assurance that you won’t end up in a spittoon.
Perhaps, depending upon your luck and the weather,
you will even be a footnote to history.
You have a target on your face
(or what remains of your face after the cosmetic procedures have worn off).
Dorian Grey reminds himself of your life.
Take nothing for granted, my buddy, my pal.
You have been the winner in wars
in wives, in arguments, in poker, in stocks.
In real life.
In the olden days it was enough.
“A glimpse of stocking was looked on
as something shocking.”
Today, your earnings, your wins,
are subject to “legal review”,
especially if others who’ve triumphed
seek to assure their continued triumph.
Having a headline featuring your financial ruin
is no enviable position.
Those who are featured on the covers of magazines
which pretend respectability and honor, and
newspapers which twist and disparage the truth
eventually end up recycled or burned.
When the picture of a disfigured Dorian Grey
begins to appear familiar when you look in the mirror,
it’s time to hire a ghost writer.
Take nothing for granted, old pal,
after your eyes have been yanked and sold for spare parts.
Your heart, kidneys, liver, sold to the highest bidder.
Your conscience, vote, opinion, beliefs —
kidnapped, and held for ransom.
No more “good old days” for you
unless decency and justice rear their beautiful heads.
I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for decency and justice.
Not in this time and place.
By the numbers
1. Subcutaneous dreams ensconce sodden memories. Wishes from your secret self perpetuate themselves in a swollen cask, like a fine wine.
2. Push back the cuticles of daily subterfuge to find yourself lurking unawares.
3. The whole shebang wandered in search of freedom’s sarcophagus on the dawn of an era presumed to be darkened by the blood of the lamb, but actually consecrated to heights unimagined.
4. Your mental muscles move cautiously beyond the realm of sequestered innocence.
5. Your giving back the blue jeans you wore in yesteryear's triumphs collided with my memories of unsanctioned, filibustered gallons of hope and bliss.
6. Dubious explanations dominated our desires.
7. Curious endeavors cornered the market on contrived creativity.
her feet echo from wall to wall
her feet echo from wall to wall.
the quick air died at her back.
lost luster blew its whistle
in the whorl of her burdened ear.
all the night gave her was granite shadow.
the guise of the world
could break her down, but
with the weight of her grit and
the bulk of her heart
she turned back.
(A found poem. All lines taken from various poems in Sylvia Plath’s Colossus.)
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