Rick Blum has been chronicling life’s vagaries through essays and poetry for more than 30 years. His early works were published in several, now defunct, national magazines, whose fate he takes no credit for. He was a regular opinion columnist for eleven years for the newsweekly The Mosquito, which, surprisingly, is still in print. More recently, his writings have appeared in The Literary Hatchet, The Satirist, and WINK magazine, among others. He is also a frequent contributor to the Humor Times, and has been published in numerous poetry anthologies. Mr. Blum is a three-time winner of the annual Carlisle Poetry Contest. His poem, Tomfoolery, received honorable mention in The Boston Globe Deflategate poetry challenge. Currently, he is holed up in his office in Massachusetts trying to pen the perfect bio, which he plans to share as soon as he stops laughing at the sheer futility of this effort.

Inexplicable

It’s been missing for many months now –
too many to fix its disappearance date with certainty.
I assumed if I were patient it would show up eventually,
like a peripatetic progeny who runs out of cash.
Yet, it remains as imperceptible as Congressional comity.
 
Of course, it may have simply expired, a victim of years
of overuse and occasional abuse. Perhaps I don’t need it;
never did. Can’t say it helped much scrabbling up
the corporate ladder. In fact, it often caused
more problems than it solved – popping out suddenly
for a whimsical turn when gravity was the order of the day.
 
Yet, I can’t help but glance about furtively, hoping to spot
a telltale sign that it is nearby, waiting to reappear
in a flash of brilliance, once again taking a central role
in navigating this oft-harsh world. In fact, I’ve never needed
it more than I do right now, when a sense of humor
might help contrive a clever closing line
to render more palatable this decidedly dour dirge.

Time’s Passing: A Sesquipedalian Lucubration

Legerity loiters on the far corner of my escritoire
waiting to be unceremoniously ripped off its plastic perch
tossed in the offal
forever forgotten
even when I desperately need a noun
to limn facile quickness of body or mind
 
In its place mewls grimalkin –
an old female cat by another name –
though it too will be usurped tomorrow morn
by a new word-of-the-day
perhaps one to describe a mephitic mood
caused by an impending deadline
or symbolic habiliments worn by Orthodox Jews
on High Holy Days
 
For more than twenty years these lyrical lexemes
have bloomed like nyctanisticmorning glories
impervious to the fact
that each circadian unveiling of their nubilous beauty
delivers them – and me – but one step closer
to life’s mortiferous chill
and unappealable gravepassing –
a discommoding thought
I just as soon deracinate chop-chop