This is the most overtly musical piece in the catalog, and it knows it. Where most Plahm poems use the page as their native medium—exploiting line breaks, visual spacing, bold text—”The Feelies” is written for the ear. The opening quatrain establishes the form: “I got a case of the feelies / I feel like touchin’ you / I feel like snugglin’ with you / I feel like spoonin’ too.” The dropped g’s (touchin’, snugglin’, spoonin’) signal dialect and also rhythm—each word lands on a beat, the apostrophes functioning as musical notation for where the voice should swallow the consonant. “A case of the feelies” treats love as a medical condition, which connects to the catalog’s AGS poems and to “She Is My Infection”—in Plahm’s universe, the body registers love as a syndrome, something you catch and can’t shake. “A fool in bloom / Like springtime in my chest” is the verse’s sharpest image: the fool doesn’t just feel foolish, he flowers, the embarrassment producing beauty. The internal rhyme of “bloom” and “room” (implied) gives the line a Tin Pan Alley quality that suits the form.The chorus—”I got the feelies, baby, it’s true / All of my sugar’s pourin’ on you / Caught in your smile, stuck like glue / I got the feelies— / Do you got ’em too?”—is designed for repetition, and the AABB rhyme scheme (true/you, glue/too) is deliberately simple, prioritizing singability over complexity. “All of my sugar’s pourin’ on you” connects to the HoneyBeeBard honey imagery—sugar and nectar are interchangeable in this world, and “pourin'” is generous, abundant, overflowing. The bridge—”Sometimes I wonder if you feel it too / This flutterin’ storm I’m fallin’ through”—introduces the poem’s single moment of uncertainty. “Flutterin’ storm” is an oxymoron that captures the feeling precisely: butterflies (gentle, delicate) experienced as tempest (overwhelming, disorienting). The resolution—”But one look from you and I just knew— / I’m not alone in the feelies”—resolves the doubt in a single glance, which is how doubt resolves in pop songs: instantly, romantically, without negotiation.The middle section—”My heart’s all gooey— / With honey and lovin’ for you / Come close to me, I’ll whisper low / Beneath the stars, beneath the glow / Just us under the midnight blue”—shifts from the bouncy verse register into something closer to a slow dance. “Heart’s all gooey” is deliberately un-poetic, choosing the tactile over the lyrical, and “midnight blue” as a color rather than just a time gives the nocturnal scene a painter’s specificity. The repeated chorus anchors the whole structure, and the poem ends on the hook question—”Do you got ’em too?”—leaving the Muse’s answer unresolved, which is both a pop-song convention (the hook invites the listener to answer) and a recurring catalog theme (the poet sees the Muse but doesn’t know if she sees him back, as in “Illumination”).Published the day before “Grill Me Tender,” these two pieces together showcase the catalog’s range within the populist register: one is a song, the other is a narrative. Both use dropped g’s and Southern inflection, both address the Muse as “baby,” both treat love as something physical and messy. The neologism “the feelies” itself is the poem’s best invention—it sounds like it’s always existed, like a term your grandmother used, which is the mark of a successful coinage. At 21 likes, this performs above average, confirming that the catalog’s readership responds to musicality and accessible warmth.

A charming, unpretentious song-lyric that succeeds entirely on voice, rhythm, and the warmth of its invented vocabulary. “The feelies” as a coinage is genuinely good—it sounds natural, fills a real lexical gap (there’s no casual English word for the specific cocktail of tenderness, desire, and giddiness this poem describes), and anchors the entire structure with a repeatable hook. The dropped g’s perform Southern dialect as musical notation, and the AABB rhyme scheme is the right choice for a piece designed to be heard rather than studied. “A fool in bloom” is a lovely compressed image, and “flutterin’ storm” captures romantic vertigo with oxymoronic precision. The “gooey” heart section achieves the deliberate un-poeticness that Plahm uses in his best accessible work—choosing the child’s word over the literary one, trusting that directness has its own dignity. The limitation is the form’s limitation: song lyrics are structurally repetitive, and on the page (without melody) the repeated chorus reads as redundancy rather than refrain. The rhyme scheme, while functional, occasionally drives the content rather than serving it—”stuck like glue” is the kind of ready-made rhyme that a melody would rescue but the page exposes. Still, as a demonstration of the catalog’s musical ambitions and as a piece that could genuinely be performed, this does what it sets out to do with warmth, rhythm, and an infectious central conceit.