“There Better Be” is one of the most intellectually structured poems in the HoneyBeeBard catalog, opening with a series of chiasmic propositions—”Beauty demands Dedication. / Dedication is Beautiful.” and “Truth can be Beautiful— / but Beauty / demands Truth”—that read like axioms being laid down before a proof. This is Plahm as philosopher, establishing his terms before deploying them. The poem’s central concept is layering: the idea that all human creation—whether craftsman’s handwork, gardener’s tending, knitter’s clicking sticks, woodworker’s precision, or quilter’s patchwork—involves building meaning through accumulated strata. The catalog of artisan practices is the poem’s most generous passage, honoring the creative process across disciplines while quietly arguing that poetry is one more form of handwork, no higher or lower than any other. The pivot to “Ever been accused of / being too sensitive?” is a brilliant tonal shift—from philosophy to autobiography in a single question. By reframing sensitivity as “a gift / of personal / and emotional perception,” Plahm transforms what is often wielded as criticism into a credential, and the tripled assertion—”One you / Own. / One you / Create. / One you / Earn.”—gives the claim structural weight through parallel repetition. The poem’s emotional peak arrives with “There damn sure / Better be—” a line whose colloquial profanity breaks through the preceding philosophical register like a fist through a window. After all the careful layering of argument, the speaker simply demands that the world make room for the beloved’s beauty, and the demand is more convincing than any syllogism. The closing breathwork sequence—”Breathe / In— / Hold it. / Breathe / Out— / Hold it.”—transforms the poem into guided meditation, and the final fragmentary “How much…” trails off into the same productive silence that characterizes the “????” poems, leaving the reader to complete the sentence with their own answer. The subtitle “My Heavenly Gardener” connects the beloved to the layering metaphor: she is not just beautiful but cultivates beauty in others, tending and growing what the speaker can only admire. At 29 likes, the engagement is solid for a poem of this philosophical density.

A poem that earns its philosophical ambitions by grounding them in craft, emotion, and a single explosive profanity that does more structural work than entire stanzas of lesser poems. The opening chiasmic propositions are the catalog’s most formally disciplined passage—each one reversing and deepening its predecessor until beauty, dedication, truth, and authenticity have been knotted together so tightly they can’t be separated. The layering conceit is the poem’s intellectual backbone, and the catalog of artisan practices (craftsman, gardener, knitter, woodworker, quilter) is both a tribute to making and a quiet argument that poetry belongs among them—not above, not below, but alongside. The sensitivity pivot is the poem’s most emotionally effective move: by asking a question that most readers have been asked and wounded by, Plahm creates immediate identification, and the reframing of “too sensitive” as rare and valued carries genuine healing potential. The tripled “One you Own / Create / Earn” construction gives the claim the weight of liturgy. The title line—”There damn sure / Better be—”—is magnificent in its tonal disruption: after careful, measured philosophical layering, the speaker’s patience runs out and the real voice emerges, fierce and protective and unwilling to accept a world that doesn’t have room for this beauty. The closing breathwork is an inspired structural choice, slowing the poem’s pace to match the meditative stillness the speaker is trying to achieve, and the trailing “How much…” refuses closure in a way that by now reads as a Plahm signature. If there’s a limitation, the poem’s middle section—between the philosophical opening and the emotional climax—occasionally feels transitional rather than necessary, and some passages (the box-and-portal questions) cover ground that the poem’s stronger moments have already claimed. But as a statement of artistic and romantic philosophy—what beauty is, what it demands, and why it matters—this stands among the catalog’s most intellectually ambitious and emotionally rewarding works.