by Paul Hostovsky
Bumptious was Wednesday’s
Webster’s Word of the Day,
and because it kind of rhymes
with the guy in the White House
and because it’s the perfect word
for what he is—rudely and noisily
overconfident and over-assertive—
and because it comes from bump
and the suffix -tious, which gives us
other apposite modifiers such as
captious and fractious, which also
perfectly describe this guy for whom
no one was inspired to write an inaugural poem—
neither the first time around nor the second—
and because the opposite of bumptious
is humble, a word that is not in his vocabulary,
and finally, because better late than never,
I offer you this belated poem on the occasion
of the inauguration of the bumptious dick
(which is a perfect example of synecdoche, i.e.
that part of him representing the whole of him)
who does not represent me, who does not represent
anyone I know or love, who does not represent
anything I believe in—which is not only a fact,
a true fact, but a good example of anaphora.
Paul Hostovsky’s poems have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer’s Almanac, and Best of the Net. He has been published in Poetry, Passages North, Carolina Quarterly, Shenandoah, New Delta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Atlanta Review, Poetry East, The Sun, and many other journals and anthologies. He has won a Pushcart Prize, the Comstock Review's Muriel Craft Bailey Award, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and chapbook contests from Grayson Books, Riverstone Press, Frank Cat Press, Split Oak Press, and Sport Literate. Paul has thirteen full-length collections of poetry, the most recent being Pitching for the Apostates (2023). He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. He lives with his wife Marlene in Medfield, Massachusetts.
Webster’s Word of the Day,
and because it kind of rhymes
with the guy in the White House
and because it’s the perfect word
for what he is—rudely and noisily
overconfident and over-assertive—
and because it comes from bump
and the suffix -tious, which gives us
other apposite modifiers such as
captious and fractious, which also
perfectly describe this guy for whom
no one was inspired to write an inaugural poem—
neither the first time around nor the second—
and because the opposite of bumptious
is humble, a word that is not in his vocabulary,
and finally, because better late than never,
I offer you this belated poem on the occasion
of the inauguration of the bumptious dick
(which is a perfect example of synecdoche, i.e.
that part of him representing the whole of him)
who does not represent me, who does not represent
anyone I know or love, who does not represent
anything I believe in—which is not only a fact,
a true fact, but a good example of anaphora.
Paul Hostovsky’s poems have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer’s Almanac, and Best of the Net. He has been published in Poetry, Passages North, Carolina Quarterly, Shenandoah, New Delta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Atlanta Review, Poetry East, The Sun, and many other journals and anthologies. He has won a Pushcart Prize, the Comstock Review's Muriel Craft Bailey Award, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and chapbook contests from Grayson Books, Riverstone Press, Frank Cat Press, Split Oak Press, and Sport Literate. Paul has thirteen full-length collections of poetry, the most recent being Pitching for the Apostates (2023). He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. He lives with his wife Marlene in Medfield, Massachusetts.
