Plahm plays a brilliant rhetorical trick on his reader. The opening couplets deploy his established AGS vocabulary: twitching fingers, wiggling toes, itching hands, burning feet—symptoms cataloged across multiple illness poems in his catalog. But the nodding head and moving butt begin to shift the register, and the question “Have I got the Fever?” cracks the disguise wide open. This isn’t Alpha-Gal; this is music. The poem then erupts into pure kinetic energy: “Turn it up! / Amp the volume!” The repeated surrender—”I surrender / I surrender / I surrender”—mirrors the helplessness of an AGS attack but inverts its meaning entirely. Where illness demands surrender through agony, music demands surrender through ecstasy. The refrain “There is no cure” operates on both levels: AGS has no cure, and neither does the love of rhythm—and for once, the poet doesn’t want one. The “-in'” endings throughout (twitchin’, wigglin’, itchin’, burnin’, swingin’, groovin’) give the poem a musical cadence that begs to be sung rather than read—fitting, as this is also Track 04 on the “5 Courses in Blue” EP, a collaboration with vocalist Elena Welch. The closing image of burning the fever away completes the inversion: disease destroys, but this fever purifies. A poem that reclaims the vocabulary of illness for joy.

A wildly energetic poem that achieves its effect through one of Plahm’s cleverest structural gambits: using the language of chronic illness to describe musical ecstasy. For readers familiar with his AGS poems, the opening stanzas create genuine tension—is this another episode?—before the reveal recontextualizes every symptom as groove. This bait-and-switch is more than clever wordplay; it’s a philosophical statement that the body capable of such suffering is equally capable of such joy. The refrain structure (“Turn it up! / Amp the volume!”) and the triple surrenders create genuine rhythmic propulsion—this poem moves, physically, and one can feel it straining toward the music it describes. The “-in'” contractions give the whole piece a drawling, bluesy cadence that makes it one of Plahm’s most naturally musical texts, which is appropriate given its life as a track on “5 Courses in Blue.” The line “There is no cure / For this fever / This rhythm of disease / And I don’t want one” is the poem’s thesis and its best moment—it reclaims the language of incurability from despair and hands it to delight. Where the poem has minor limitations is in its repetitive structure; the two identical refrains and triple surrenders, while effective rhythmically, don’t develop new material on return. But as a song lyric—which it also is—this repetition is a feature, not a flaw. A poem that proves the body that suffers is also the body that dances.