Plahm opens with a disclaimer that is itself a poetic statement: “This one is half baked… / I scribbled it in the margins / just because— / why not?” The “why not?” is a creative manifesto disguised as a shrug—it insists that a poem doesn’t need to be finished, polished, or purposeful to exist. The subtitle—”Clickety-Clack and Lovely Legs”—announces the poem’s two subjects and the gap between them: the machine and the body, the screen and the woman. The opening stanza is pure onomatopoeia as cubicle portrait: “Click-click drag / Click-click slide / Click-click scroll.” These are the sounds of a man whose day is measured in mouse movements, and the repetition creates a rhythmic monotony that the poem will spend its entire length trying to escape. “My mind wonders. / in between” is the poem’s first crack in the wall—”wonders” rather than “wanders” (whether intentional or not) suggests that the mind isn’t just drifting but questioning, marveling, refusing to accept the clickety-clack as the whole story. The 4 AM cat detail is a gem of domestic specificity—tiny paw prints on the keyboard from a cat who has its own nocturnal agenda, and the question mark after “maybe my cat?” suggests the possibility that the paw prints could be something else entirely, or nothing, or a hallucination from fourteen hours of screen time. The poem’s structural pivot arrives with “Oh my! / Oh my goodness! / Look at that!!”—three exclamations of escalating astonishment that read like a man who has been staring at a screen for so long that a real human being in the peripheral vision is a genuine shock. The lovely-legs passage is the poem’s most playful section: the alliterative tongue-twister (“Lovely Lady’s Lovely Legs / ten times fast”) converts admiration into a game, and the confession that the clickety-clack in his “scarecrow mind” goes “wickety-wackity” is a wonderful invention—the keyboard sounds mutating into nonsense syllables under the influence of beauty. The Lone Ranger riff is the poem’s comic centerpiece: “Lone’ly Ranger” (the apostrophe surgically inserting loneliness into the heroic name) with sidekicks Goober & Wobble, two raccoons eating the cat’s food, followed by the deadpan “I think, / they ate my cats.” The escalation from raccoons stealing food to raccoons eating cats to “did I forgot to feed them?” is Plahm’s comic timing at its best—each revelation more absurd than the last, delivered with the casualness of a man too tired to be alarmed. The closing returns to the keyboard and the legs: “I’m just a keyboard junky, / longing for those sexy legs / to grace my vision.” The word “grace” is perfectly chosen—it elevates the looking from ogling to something closer to prayer. The final line—”the endless clickety-clack of longing”—closes the circle, converting the opening’s mechanical sound into an emotional condition. The clicking wasn’t work; it was longing, all along.

A poem that knows exactly what it is—half baked, margin-scribbled, imperfect—and makes that imperfection its subject and its charm. The “half baked” disclaimer is not false modesty but accurate self-assessment: this is a poem that wanders, digresses, forgets where it was going, and arrives somewhere unexpected, which is precisely how fourteen-hour keyboard days feel from the inside. The clickety-clack onomatopoeia is effectively deployed, creating a rhythmic cage that the poem keeps escaping through absurdity and desire. The 4 AM cat paw prints are a perfect domestic detail—specific, funny, and slightly surreal in the way that pre-dawn moments always are. The lovely-legs eruption is the poem’s most energized passage, and the tongue-twister game demonstrates Plahm’s understanding that language can be physical: saying “Lovely Lady’s Lovely Legs” ten times fast is itself a kind of dance for the mouth, connecting to the poem’s longing for bodily experience beyond the keyboard. The Lone’ly Ranger bit is the poem’s comic peak—the apostrophe insertion is formally clever, and the raccoon escalation (stealing food → eating cats → “did I forgot to feed them?”) is slapstick timed with a standup comedian’s instinct. The grammatical “error” in “did I forgot” reads as deliberate exhaustion rather than mistake—a man too tired for conjugation. Where the poem is genuinely half baked is in its middle transitions: the movement from monotony to dance to lovely legs to Lone Ranger to raccoons to keyboard junky is held together by voice rather than structure, and a few passages (“Still, just a Disney fantasy. / A / bedazzlement / of / bewilderment”) are more process than product—the poet thinking aloud rather than composing. But the poem’s self-awareness protects it: by calling itself half baked, it makes the rawness a feature. The closing line—”the endless clickety-clack of longing”—is a genuinely accomplished image that converts the mechanical into the emotional and earns its place as the poem’s final word. A poem that proves even margin scribbles can contain real feeling.