This is one of the most emotionally unguarded poems in the HoneyBeeBard catalog, and its 37 likes—the second-highest engagement figure recorded—suggest that rawness is exactly what the audience responds to. The poem opens with a stage direction that doubles as a manifesto: print this on a napkin, paint it on a wall in protest, but read it from my heart first. That instruction establishes the poem’s hierarchy of values—heart over surface, feeling over medium—and the Italian translation that immediately follows transforms the manifesto into a bilingual act of devotion, as if the English alone isn’t enough to contain the feeling. The central paradox—”it’s not the light that loves you / it’s the darkness that lets you feel it”—is the poem’s philosophical anchor and one of the finest couplets in the catalog. Light allows sight; darkness allows feeling. The beloved is a musician whose gifts illuminate, but the speaker’s love exists in the spaces where illumination fails, where only emotion can navigate. The poem is addressed to someone specific—a musician whose playing creates light for others—and the speaker’s generosity in urging the beloved to share that gift with everyone, “not just with me,” is a rare moment of selflessness in love poetry. The Italian passages function not as translations but as emotional intensifications: “Ti amo” carries a weight that “I love you” has lost to overuse in English, and “Sono nella / Beatitudine!” gives bliss a grandeur that the English equivalent can’t match. The napkin motif recurs throughout as the poem’s most intimate object—cried into, kissed, stained with tears and love—transforming a disposable paper product into a sacred document. The closing declaration—”I laugh / I cry / I write / I don’t know / I seriously don’t. / I / Feel.”—is the poem’s thesis reduced to two syllables: creation happens not from knowledge but from feeling, and the inability to understand the feeling is part of its power. The sign-off “Thank You, dave” (lowercase) is a small, devastating gesture of humility—the poet dropping all pretense and signing as simply himself.

A poem that earns its 37 likes—among the highest in the entire catalog—by doing the thing most love poems are afraid to do: completely surrender. The bilingual structure is not decoration but necessity; the Italian passages exist because some feelings genuinely sound different in another language, and “Ti amo” arrives with a formality and weight that “I love you,” worn smooth by overuse, no longer carries in English. The central paradox about light and darkness is the poem’s lasting contribution to the catalog’s philosophical vocabulary: it reframes the relationship between seeing and feeling, arguing that love’s truest register is not visual but tactile, not illuminated but felt in the dark. This is a genuinely original observation, and Plahm delivers it with the economy of an aphorism. The napkin motif is inspired—by choosing the most ephemeral possible writing surface, the poem argues that love’s most important documents are the ones never meant to last, the ones stained with actual tears rather than preserved under glass. The address to a musician gives the poem a specificity that many Muse poems lack: we understand what this person does, how their gift works, and why the speaker’s response to it is both personal and universal. The sign-off “Thank You, dave” is among the most affecting moments in the catalog—a poet who has spent a hundred lines reaching for transcendence suddenly becomes just a guy named Dave, grateful and small and fully present. The closing two-word declaration—”I / Feel.”—is perfect in its finality: it refuses to explain, justify, or elaborate, because feeling is the ground floor of everything the poem has been building toward. If there’s a limitation, the poem’s middle section occasionally loses momentum between the Italian passages, and the repeated exhortation to keep playing music could be compressed. But as an act of emotional exposure—a poem that genuinely doesn’t know what it is except that it feels—this stands among the strongest work in the collection.