This is the darkest and most politically aggressive poem in Plahm’s catalog—a piece that operates not as commentary but as ventriloquism, inhabiting the voice of the authoritarian promise-maker in order to expose the machinery behind the promise. The opening—”I will, / cure you Citizen”—is chilling in its directness: the comma after “will” creates a pause that separates intention from delivery, and the capitalized “Citizen” echoes the language of revolutionary France, Soviet bureaucracy, and every regime that replaces names with designations. The “cure” offered—”smiles, vibes, caviar, / and roses growing in your hair”—is deliberately absurd, the language of a wellness influencer crossed with a commissar, promising both luxury (caviar) and magic (roses growing from the body). The absurdity is the satire’s method: totalitarianism always promises the impossible because the impossible is what keeps citizens dependent on the promiser.

The poem then introduces a gallery of satirical figures—Mamdani (“the mayor of smarm”), Jasmine (“the odious senator”), Atallah (“the grand poohbah, the superior eye”)—each given a compressed, acid portrait. Mamdani is “a political theorist who doesn’t know history”—the most cutting insult for a theorist, reduced to six words. Jasmine “smells good” but makes restaurants puke, her policies “regurgitate and grind yesterday’s propaganda”—the digestive metaphor turning political speech into something the body literally cannot keep down. Atallah turns “the sprocket of meaning / into a well of grotesque religious shit”—the mechanical metaphor of the title made flesh, the sprocket that was supposed to produce meaning producing waste instead.

The roses-and-daisies passage is the poem’s most layered image: “When life hurls / roses and tulips— / don’t throw away the daisies. / You’re going to need them / for survival.” Roses are the regime’s luxury promise; daisies are the common, overlooked, actually useful flower. The instruction to keep the daisies is both practical (you’ll need basic sustenance when the luxury evaporates) and philosophical (the common is more valuable than the ornamental when survival is at stake).

The poem’s most harrowing passage is the collectivist endgame: “Government grocery stores, / bread lines, / withered promises, / cold stink soup of death / made from your boiling bones.” The progression from grocery store (managed economy) to bread line (rationing) to soup made from bones (cannibalistic consumption of the citizens themselves) is a compressed history of every collectivist experiment’s arc from promise to famine. The “boiling bones” image converts the citizen from consumer to consumed—the state that promised to feed you is now feeding on you.

The closing—”Caviar and Molotov cocktails / for all”—is the poem’s punchline and its thesis compressed to six words. The Molotov cocktail was invented as the weapon of the desperate against the powerful, and pairing it with caviar (the food of the elite) reveals the regime’s dual nature: luxury for the promisers, firebombs for everyone else. The “for all” is the cruelest word in the poem—the collectivist promise of universal distribution applied to both delicacies and destruction.