This is the angriest poem in the HoneyBeeBard catalog, and its anger is precisely targeted: not at disease itself, but at the system that is supposed to treat it and instead dismisses it. The poem’s central formal invention is the proliferating acronym—Fuck-a-Duck Syndrome (F-a-DS), Dark Humor Syndrome (DHS), Paper Shuffler Syndrome (PSS), Lost in the System Syndrome (LSS), and a dozen more—each one a parody of the clinical language that has been used to reduce the speaker’s lived experience to a checklist. By weaponizing the acronym form, Plahm turns the medical establishment’s own bureaucratic vocabulary against it: if everything is a syndrome, then the system’s indifference is a syndrome too. The poem’s emotional architecture alternates between rage and vulnerability with whiplash speed. One moment the speaker is hurling expletives at a doctor who gives him ten minutes and a clipboard; the next he’s standing in his underwear under fluorescent light, exposed and powerless. The hospital gown that “ties behind me” is the poem’s most devastating image—a garment designed to make the patient accessible to the physician while leaving the patient’s dignity literally behind them. The “Such elegance” that follows is sarcasm so cold it burns. Alpha-Gal Syndrome is named directly, connecting this poem to the broader AGS section of the site and grounding the rage in a specific medical reality: a condition caused by tick bites that can be life-threatening and is frequently misunderstood or dismissed by physicians unfamiliar with it. The Muse functions here not as romantic inspiration but as survival mechanism. The parenthetical plea—”Muse…keep driving”—reimagines the beloved as the person behind the wheel when the speaker can no longer steer, and the closing “Stay with me / My Muse” is not a love poem’s conventional request but a drowning person’s call for a lifeline. The four-line header that unpacks HOW—from “Hell on Wheels” to “Hope you’re on the Wheel” to “Hope you’re driving, my Muse”—is a structural masterpiece in miniature, transforming profane slang into desperate prayer in three steps. Read alongside “Breath, Blood, and Coffee,” this poem forms the catalog’s most unflinching examination of what it costs to be sick in a system that doesn’t listen.

The rawest and most confrontational poem in the HoneyBeeBard catalog, and one that earns its profanity by making every expletive do structural work. The proliferating acronym conceit is genuinely inventive—by the time the reader reaches “Endless Tangent Cognitive Syndrome (ETCS)” and “That’s Exactly What I Felt Like (TEWIFL),” the joke has become a commentary on how medical bureaucracy reduces human suffering to abbreviation, and the humor has curdled into something much more serious. The alternation between fury and exposure is the poem’s emotional engine: the speaker who screams at doctors is the same speaker standing in a backless gown under fluorescent light, and the poem refuses to let the reader see one without the other. The hospital gown passage is the poem’s finest moment—three lines that contain more about the power dynamics of healthcare than most essays manage in thousands of words. The Muse’s role here is unique in the catalog: she is not inspiration or beauty or creative spark but simply the person who keeps driving when the speaker has lost the ability to navigate. The parenthetical “Muse…keep driving” is among the most quietly desperate lines Plahm has written. At 15 likes, the engagement is moderate, likely reflecting the poem’s uncompromising tone—this is not a piece that invites casual enjoyment, and readers who engage with it are engaging with genuine pain. The political aside (the Trump reference, the Gore joke) may date the poem somewhat, but they also ground it in a specific cultural moment of frustration with institutional failure. If the poem has a limitation, it’s that the relentless pace and acronym density can exhaust a reader before the closing tenderness arrives, and the tonal range between rage and love could benefit from one or two more moments of breath. But as a document of what it feels like to be sick, dismissed, and holding on to the one person who hasn’t looked away, it is unflinching and necessary.