Works By R. Bremner

R. Bremner has worked as a cab driver, a UPS truck unloader, a security guard, a computer programmer, and a vice-president at Citibank. He he has published in International Poetry Review, Inclement, Turbulence, Sanitarium, Title Waves, the Passaic Review, Poets Online, Every Writer’s Resource, the Red Wheelbarrow Anthology, Ancient Paths, the Society of Classical Poets, Yellow Chair Review, Oleander Review, Paterson Literary Review, Journal of Formal Poetry, the 2015 and 2016 editions of the Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) Anthology, and the Mensa Bulletin. Despite a major stroke and a liver transplant, he keeps on writing, by the grace of God! Among his eBooks are Stories of Love and Hate, Poems for the Narrow, Dog Stories, and You are once again the stranger. He has travelled extensively, especially to Sri Lanka, birthplace of his wife. R. Bremner is a frequent reader at various poetry events and a proud member of the Montclair Write Group.

WITR 3

Western winds, high as a kite, seek places to hide from samurai swords.  Cough syrup smells like the best of everything, but craft spells break angles against the red tide of ennui.  Shadow puppets bleach the chemical air of aviation to walk the moon and shut it up behind a door of desire. Bury your heart in the power of robots! Everyday I ask “is anything real” and everyday the answer haunts my strange intentions. Churches issue the warning call, but their holy silences make it easier to die. Kittens fall on my gizzard, while lizards, vultures, and wizards save the people outside from a fresh young galaxy.  Factory flaws of Suez build a wall to dream of the dawn’s beach of pleasure, while I once again go thermal into the code.,

(Thanks to WITR and the Rochester Institute of Technology.)



Chusid

 “yes I can, no you can’t” plowed the jazz messenger as he gigoloed a sacrifice to the Drum Suite.  He shook his boogaloo thing into the red red, feeding silver apples to the dead woman walking. Shine down your fluorescences  into tomorrow now and let me be because everybody’s here. All’s well in quiet corners and empty spaces if you can spark a page for Proust. Let us play ball in the marina, where Joe Frank awaits. 

(Thanks to Irwin Chusid and WFMU.)



Kelly

I be your man when the flowers be a vintage hedonist who’ll sell my soul to the Allies for some backroom blues and a bongo boy. Never be that man of the higher state of beach sayonaras. The legendary someday fool escorts the summertime to the dead beat of poets. Moon shadows are velvet tones in a lost desert ocean that reverberates with the thoughts of a nightstand to mess up your mind. I miss you so much when the rockets drink fun and beer and etiquette in the Congo with pink monkey birds.  Checkered lads wail and shake down a China doll with sand in her shoes who drifts a monster into their misfit wilds. The way I feel about you is best and a combo of  a midnight run nocturne and eyes all over town.  My magician, you’re never alone with five Canadians and a ringing phone in Plainfield. Four seasons of souls are missing the alligator. I don’t know, the cult is a mystery, a light from candlelight, you were my summer girl and I’m still the same young man. You are never to be forgotten but it’s over now, my mustang, accelerate into ventures of perfidia and bring the summer.  Sorry you bossed into the journeymen where the misery of devils was voodoo?  The markets are out of limits in the ghoulin’ jay. 

(Thanks to Bill Kelly and WFMU.)


La Patrie

With a tumorous flash,
their peppered cone spires
muscled into our
visual periphery.

Tasting our blood,
sweat, and tears,
they crisply declaimed,
“This juice is no good.
Come with us!”

They intercepted all feeble attempts
to recede into detail.

I presumed to try and
scratch their itch.

“This is no itch,
it is our flag,”
they stated,
“and it wallows in your sores.”

Guiding us on eggshell planks
over mucky grandeur,
they sardonically mocked:
“Next time, fashion
a more convincing blight!”

A proper match was set
on adjacent horizontal
striped fields.
With a gentle scam
and the right measure,
the joust was ours

(and, quietly, all due honours).

Hail, patriot.


Rex

Ray was linked to the popping popeye of a frenetic chick chick whose thunder brought down tones of jungle fever on the dot of a runabout wildfire over the Atlantic with four fifths of a jewel of 100 proof Jim Beam and a juvenile delinquent who was gone, gone, gone. Little moon men wondered if Uncle Bud could twist their wild hog leap into a walking spade of three sweet peas. An Argonaut wino saw his greedy pig not get enough of love or chess. He mamboed with Stella, who asked a teen queen “wa’ he say?” and was told “you good boy, you get cookie”. But Stella was not a good boy, nor were the Arabians in the shack who threw darts at the rocks at midnight under the twin star. King bees felt so good in the flames of Hollywood Royale saying that Harvey’s got a girlfriend with an anthem of silver. Goliath traded diplomacy for money in a bright dialectic of the King diddling in the starfire of the jungle. True love is the faux pas of a joker who ebbs as Boris Karloff cuts off the pirate’s privates back stage with the Mad Hatter.  Cardinal chicks are for kids in the Sahara where the long green breakers shed tears in a box and steal medallions from a jazzman while he eats popcorn.                

(Thanks to Rex and WFMU.)