This is Plahm’s longest and most formally unrestrained political poem—a verbal torrent that reads like a journal entry crossed with a manifesto crossed with a love letter. The conceit is brilliantly accidental: the speaker begins with “The Itchy & Scratchy Show” without apparently realizing it’s a Simpsons reference, then claims the phrase as his own metaphor for irritation—both the literal kind (Alpha-Gal Syndrome, allergic reactions) and the cultural kind (media manipulation, political charlatanism). This collision of ignorance and invention is the poem’s secret engine: Plahm’s not performing cultural literacy, he’s performing something rarer—thinking out loud in real time, letting the poem discover its own meaning as it goes. The political middle section is the poem’s most incendiary passage, naming specific targets and refusing the decorum that most poetry demands. Whether this strengthens or weakens the poem depends entirely on the reader’s appetite for unfiltered opinion in verse. But the poem knows this about itself: “My Itchy and Scratchy show… / Just a personal issue. / I’ll keep it there.” The speaker can’t keep it there, of course—the personal and political keep bleeding into each other, which is the poem’s deepest insight. The closing movement is where the poem finds its emotional anchor. After pages of cultural rage, the speaker returns to the body—”Breath, blood and pain. / A sprained foot.”—and to the Muse: “And coffee / In the morning. / Thinking of… / You.” The tonal whiplash is deliberate: after all the shouting, the quietest lines carry the most weight. The final image—Itchy & Scratchy “left behind / In the rear-view mirror”—recalls the rear-view mirror in “A Singular Moment,” suggesting that Plahm’s most important revelations consistently arrive when he’s driving away from something.

The most polarizing poem in Plahm’s catalog—a piece that will either feel bracingly honest or undisciplined depending on the reader’s tolerance for raw, unedited political verse. The 35 likes suggest the audience is receptive, and there’s genuine courage in a poet willing to name names and risk alienating readers. The Itchy & Scratchy conceit is unexpectedly fertile: starting from a point of admitted ignorance about pop culture and turning it into a metaphor for systemic irritation is a move that only works because Plahm doesn’t pretend to be something he’s not. The poem’s best structural quality is its architecture of return—the phrase “Itchy & Scratchy” recurs like a refrain, each time carrying a slightly different weight, from pop culture curiosity to personal medical complaint to political metaphor to dismissed irritation in the rear-view mirror. The closing pivot to the Muse is where the poem earns its emotional payoff: after sustained fury, “coffee / In the morning. / Thinking of… / You” arrives with the force of relief, demonstrating that for Plahm, love is not escapism but the ground-level truth that makes all other truths possible. The weaknesses are the poem’s length and its resistance to editing—passages repeat ideas already established, specific political references risk dating the poem rapidly, and the tone occasionally tips from passionate to hectoring. The poem also lacks the compression that makes Plahm’s shorter works so effective; at this length, the ratio of insight to rhetoric thins. But as a document of a mind in full revolt—against media, against illness, against the erosion of honesty—the poem has an undeniable, if rough-hewn, power. It reads best as the uncut version of what “The Educated” and “Of Roots and Power” achieve with more discipline.