This is the HoneyBeeBard’s most visceral account of falling in love, and it refuses every conventional register the genre offers. There are no roses, no moonlight, no trembling hands. Instead there is a 96-mph fastball fracturing a skull, a body bouncing off concrete twice, lightning striking the same spot three times in three seconds. Each image escalates the violence of the encounter, and the accumulation is deliberate: Plahm is arguing that genuine transformation feels less like a warm embrace and more like a car crash—sudden, disorienting, and irreversible. The opening is deceptively quiet: “I was rewired / When I walked in and / You—my Muse—looked up / Smiled, and said Hi.” Four lines of domestic simplicity that the rest of the poem spends forty lines proving were actually cataclysmic. The progression from physical trauma (fractured, concussed, splintered, jellied) to neurological event (synapses disconnected, plasticity remolded) to spiritual rebirth (death, tunnel, light, resuscitation, reborn) maps the speaker’s transformation onto the full spectrum of human extremity. The neuroscience vocabulary in the recovery stanza—”Neuro realignments / Synapses disconnected / … / Reconnected in a new pattern / Plasticity remolded”—is characteristically Plahm: clinical language deployed in the service of romantic testimony, insisting that love is not just felt but physically restructures the brain. The post-rewiring world is described with the disoriented wonder of someone waking from a coma: “Colors were strange / Smells were mixed / My thoughts / In a realm I never knew / Possible.” These lines have the quality of genuine testimony—not poetic invention but reported experience. The pivot from chaos to clarity comes in the penultimate stanza: “I had a vision / A new set of skills / An objective / A desire / A mission / To protect you.” The military-register vocabulary (objective, mission) repositions the love story as vocation, and the word “protect” transforms the speaker from admirer to guardian. The closing questions—”What moment, gave you purpose? / What kissed your soul?”—turn the poem outward, inviting every reader to locate their own rewiring, their own moment of violent grace. At 29 likes, the engagement is strong, and the poem’s subtitle “Direction and Purpose” makes explicit what the verse enacts: love as compass, love as assignment, love as the reason for everything that follows.

One of the most physically intense poems in the HoneyBeeBard catalog, and one that succeeds precisely because it refuses the vocabulary of conventional love poetry and replaces it with the language of emergency rooms, neurology wards, and near-death experience. The escalating trauma metaphors—fastball, balcony fall, triple lightning strike, clinical death—could easily tip into absurdity, but Plahm holds the tone through sheer commitment: each image is specific enough to feel researched rather than decorative, and the escalation serves an argument rather than mere shock value. The argument is simple and powerful: meeting the Muse was not a pleasant experience but a shattering one, and the person who walked out was not the person who walked in. The neuroscience stanza is the poem’s most distinctive contribution, and phrases like “Synapses disconnected / … / Reconnected in a new pattern” carry genuine explanatory power—this is what falling in love actually does to the brain, rendered in language that respects both the science and the experience. The post-rewiring stanza (“Colors were strange / Smells were mixed”) achieves the disoriented wonder of synesthesia, and its simple declarative sentences have the quality of witness testimony rather than literary construction. The pivot to “mission / To protect you” is the poem’s emotional peak, the word “protect” carrying a weight that “love” or “adore” could never match—it implies danger, vigilance, sacrifice. The closing questions are well-placed and generous, transforming a personal testimony into a universal invitation. At 29 likes, the engagement reflects a poem that connects deeply with readers who recognize their own rewiring moments. If there’s a limitation, the middle section’s accumulation of trauma metaphors occasionally delays the poem’s forward motion—the reader grasps the argument by the fastball stanza and must wait through lightning and clinical death before the poem advances to its next idea. A slightly tighter middle might have increased the impact of the neurological revelation that follows. But as an origin story—the HoneyBeeBard explaining how he became the HoneyBeeBard—this is among the most honest and physically compelling accounts in the catalog.