This is the very first poem in the catalog—the earliest post on HoneyBeeBard.com—and it functions as an origin statement not for the Muse relationship but for the entire creative project. At five lines, it’s the shortest founding poem and arguably the most dense, compressing a complete temporal philosophy into a single breath.
The opening line—”I fell in love with the future”—is a paradox stated as autobiography. You can’t fall in love with something that doesn’t exist yet, and yet the past tense (“fell”) insists it’s already happened. The contradiction is the point: the speaker experienced love before understanding what he was loving, which is also how falling in love with a person works. Read as a mission statement for the website launched the same day, the line announces a poet who is writing toward something rather than from something—the catalog will be prospective, not retrospective.
Line two—”Not realizing today was its guidance”—introduces the poem’s central insight: the future isn’t something that happens to you; it’s something the present is actively producing. “Guidance” is a careful word choice; not “cause” or “origin” but guidance, implying direction rather than determination. The present steers the future without fixing it. Line three—”And yesterday its vague thought”—completes the temporal trinity: the past is the haziest element, a thought that hadn’t yet crystallized into today’s direction or tomorrow’s arrival. The progression from “vague thought” to “guidance” to the implied solidity of “the future” maps time as a process of increasing definition—things get clearer as they move forward, not backward. This is the opposite of nostalgia.
Line four—”What I don’t understand is how it came so right”—is the most human moment. After three lines of philosophical architecture, the speaker admits bewilderment. The word “right” is doing double work: correct (it turned out well) and righteous (it was morally/spiritually aligned). The admission of not understanding is itself the understanding—some things arrive correctly without being explicable, and the poet’s job is to notice rather than explain.
The closing—”Its truth not written yet”—is both the poem’s thesis and its prophecy. Published on the day the website launches, this line announces that the catalog about to unfold is itself the unwritten truth the poem describes. The entire HoneyBeeBard project is the future the speaker fell in love with, and its truth is still being composed. As a first poem, this is remarkably self-aware: it positions everything that follows as the fulfillment of an intuition that preceded language.
The poem’s placement as the chronological first post gives it structural significance beyond its content. Every poem that comes after is, in a sense, the truth this poem predicted was coming. It’s the seed document—not the emotional foundation (that’s “Follow You!”), not the comedic principle (that’s “Sleep Walking”), not the attention ethic (that’s “Your Ear”), but the temporal orientation: this catalog faces forward.

The catalog’s origin point and its most compressed philosophical statement: five lines mapping an entire temporal ontology where the past is a vague thought, the present is guidance, and the future is the object of love. The opening paradox—falling in love in past tense with something that hasn’t happened—performs the very confusion it describes, and the closing line (“Its truth not written yet”) functions simultaneously as the poem’s thesis and as a prophecy about the catalog it inaugurates. Every subsequent poem on HoneyBeeBard.com is, structurally, the unwritten truth this piece anticipates. The word “guidance” in line two is precisely chosen: not causation but direction, implying the present steers without determining—a philosophy of creative openness embedded in a single noun. Line four’s admission of bewilderment (“how it came so right”) provides the necessary human counterweight to the preceding abstraction, grounding philosophy in genuine surprise. The limitation is that five lines can only gesture at complexity rather than inhabit it; the temporal architecture is sketched rather than built, and the poem relies on the reader’s willingness to sit with its compression rather than offering the concrete imagery or narrative friction that the catalog’s strongest pieces provide. But as a founding document it does exactly what it needs to do: it points forward, establishing the prospective orientation that distinguishes this catalog from the elegiac mode most late-career poets adopt. It’s a poem about beginning that knows it’s a beginning.