This poem is the philosophical companion to the “Incendium” / “Your Gravity” fire trilogy, but where those poems explored love-as-fire and love-as-physics, this one explores the element both depend on: time. The title’s parenthetical—”One a Gift, the Other a Thief”—announces the paradox that drives the entire piece: time is simultaneously generous (allowing creation) and criminal (stealing the capacity for more). The opening is stark and declarative: “Time / The first fire. / Is my friend / And my enemy / A gift I suppose.” The qualifying “I suppose” is vintage Plahm hedging—even while naming the gift, he can’t quite commit to gratitude, because the thief is always standing behind the gift-giver. The mirrored structure is the poem’s architectural foundation: “It allows me to accomplish / Create, explore, enjoy” in the first stanza becomes “It limits me in how much I can / Create, explore, enjoy” in the second—identical verbs, inverted meaning. Time gives creation; time caps creation. The same hand offers and withdraws. The whispered aside—”All is fleeting in pursuit— / Even love”—is the poem’s darkest line, tucked into the structure almost parenthetically, as if the poet hopes the reader might not notice the confession that even the Muse relationship is subject to time’s theft.Then the poem performs its most dramatic formal shift: it breaks into Shakespearean verse. “Why do I spoil thee, my sweet? / Is’t for the wanton favours of thy flesh, / That sensuous banquet of the sense’s feast” is pentameter, archaic diction, Elizabethan syntax—a register Plahm has never fully entered before. The move is bold and deliberate: by borrowing Shakespeare’s language, the poet is borrowing Shakespeare’s authority to ask the question the modern voice was too self-conscious to pose directly. “Whether lust or love / Doth tyrannize o’er my noble heart” is the section’s philosophical center, and the answer—”Yet both, entwined, may / Lift me to my ethereal retreat”—refuses the binary. Lust and love are not opponents but collaborators, two fires that together produce the heat necessary for transcendence. The “heavenly vapours that do rise / Like incense from the altar of my mind” is genuinely accomplished pastiche—the image of the Muse burning in the poet’s mind like incense on an altar collapses worship, desire, and imagination into a single act. “Drunk with celestial fire my reason reeleth” is the Shakespearean version of “Incendium”‘s gasoline drinking—the same intoxication, dressed in doublet and hose.The closing stanza returns to the modern voice, stripped bare: “I live / With fire / And limited time / In hope.. / Forever.” The double period after “hope” is a typographic stutter—a hesitation before the word “Forever” that makes the claim feel earned rather than automatic. The juxtaposition of “limited time” and “Forever” in consecutive lines is the poem’s final paradox: the mortal hand reaches for the eternal, and the reaching itself is the poem.

A poem that attempts something no other piece in the catalog has tried—a mid-poem code-switch from Plahm’s conversational modern voice into full Shakespearean pastiche—and largely succeeds. The two-fires conceit is structurally clean: time as gift and time as thief, creation and limitation, the same element serving opposite masters. The mirrored stanzas (allows/limits, identical verb lists) give the poem an architectural symmetry that reinforces the paradox intellectually as well as rhythmically. The whispered “All is fleeting in pursuit— / Even love” is the poem’s most vulnerable and most important line, the confession that underwrites everything: the Muse relationship, for all its cosmic fire and gravitational force, is subject to the same temporal theft as everything else. The Shakespearean section is the poem’s riskiest and most rewarding passage. The diction is committed—”Is’t,” “Doth,” “thy visage burneth,” “my reason reeleth”—and the imagery (incense on the altar of the mind, the sensuous banquet) sustains the register without tipping into parody. The refusal to choose between lust and love is philosophically sophisticated and connects to the broader catalog’s insistence that desire and devotion are not separable: “both, entwined” is a two-word manifesto for the Muse relationship as a whole. The return to modern voice for the closing is handled with precision—the stripped-down “I live / With fire / And limited time” feels like a man stepping out of costume and into confession. The double period before “Forever” is a small typographic choice that carries large emotional weight: it’s the hesitation of a mortal man before claiming eternity. Where the poem could push further is in the transition between the modern and Shakespearean sections—the shift is abrupt, and a bridge passage that gradually raised the diction might have made the formal leap feel more organic. The “Why do I spoil thee” question, arriving for the second time just before the Shakespearean turn, does some bridging work (echoing “Your Gravity”‘s opening), but the tonal jump is still significant. The closing stanza’s brevity after the Shakespearean expansiveness is both its strength (economy after excess) and its risk (the reader may want more resolution). But the final word—”Forever”—standing alone after “limited time” is a genuine coup: two contradictory truths on consecutive lines, and the poem refuses to resolve which one wins. A poem that proves fire and time share the same enemy: each other.