Poetry by R Bremner

Photo by Thomas Allen on Unsplash

Serenity teaches

Serenity teaches
                            beauty in a wall of Buddhist sleep. 
Many go straight to the knowing of why.
Fearless sisters of wisdom free the heroes and villains 
     from their magnificent excitement.
Strange experiences within are alive and well on Earth,
      despite the second-hand struggles to escape. 
Wise women and men temporarily defeat their racist past, 
     only to assure a murdered future. 
Dogs are unique, but not psychic, 
       no matter how much they seem to be, 
       and how much we want them to be.


Cambodian street life, 
Nepali imaginations, 
skid row clerics, 
     all give detailed instructions 
     on how to get one’s prayers answered. 
It’s been assumed by those more intelligent than I
     that dying is a trip to divine beaches in Hawaii. 
But that does not cure the anger that hangs in the air, 
     where we breathe it in and find that we can only hope 
     to be more unusual, entertaining, or valuable 
     than a bee’s backside.

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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 Climate of Opinion: Sigmund Freud in Poetry, International Poetry Review, and seventeen jazz poems in Jerry Jazz Musician. His eBook Mirrors, from Grandview University, is available free of cost from the author.