At just sixteen lines (plus a shop promo), this is one of the most compact pieces in the catalog, and it operates almost entirely through phonetic performance. The opening line—”Goot e nuff”—is not a misspelling but a transcription: Plahm writes drunkenness as a dialect, rendering the speaker’s slur as its own orthographic system. “Tryna say / Donkey Shnitzle” takes this further, the bolded nonsense phrase sitting in the poem like a punchline the speaker is too far gone to deliver properly. “Too difficul.” drops the final consonant, the period landing like a man giving up mid-word. “Haaa—” is pure exhalation, laughter that can’t quite commit to itself. The em dash after it performs the trailing off of a thought that was never going to arrive. “I’ll ‘splain / Tomorrow—” promises coherence that both speaker and reader know will never come. Then the poem pivots: “After a / Bloody Mary Sunday, / In the smoke-hazed bar” is suddenly precise scene-setting, as if the camera pulls back from the slurring face to reveal the whole tableau. “Wisdumn / from a Drunk.” bolts the misspelling to a capital-D archetype, and the period is devastating—it’s the drunk’s own self-assessment, delivered with the peculiar dignity of someone who knows exactly how ridiculous they are. The closing three lines are the poem’s real payload. The Muse “With a frown— / Wouldn’t find it / Humorous.” The em dash after “frown” creates a pause that is itself the performance of disapproval. But: “When I’m not looking, / She cracks a wry smile.” That final image is the entire Muse relationship in miniature—public disapproval, private affection. The frown is for show; the smile is the truth. It’s a tiny poem that does an enormous amount of relational work, establishing the dynamic where the speaker’s imperfections are the actual source of charm, not obstacles to it. Published the same day as “A Trinity of Authenticity, Care and Transformation,” the two pieces form a study in range: one is a sprawling ars poetica with pastoral centerpiece, the other is a bar napkin. Both land. The poem’s second life as a greeting card is perfectly calibrated—this is exactly the kind of piece that works when you hand it to someone and say “this is us.”

A perfectly executed comic sketch that knows exactly what it is and doesn’t try to be anything more. The phonetic misspellings are precise rather than sloppy—each one performs a specific degree of intoxication, from “Goot e nuff” (three drinks in) to “Too difficul” (lights going out) to “Wisdumn” (the drunk’s philosophical phase). The bolded “Donkey Shnitzle” is inspired nonsense, the kind of thing that would actually come out of someone’s mouth at 1 AM, and Plahm’s decision to bold it treats the gibberish with typographic dignity. The real craft is in the closing pivot: the Muse’s frown-to-smile arc covers more emotional ground in three lines than many longer poems manage across pages. The limitation is structural—at sixteen lines, there’s no room for the piece to develop beyond its single joke-to-tenderness arc, and its second life as a greeting card product, while commercially smart, slightly flattens the reading experience on the poetry blog. But as a palate cleanser published alongside a sprawling four-section suite, it demonstrates something important about the catalog’s range: Plahm can work at bar-napkin scale with the same control he brings to his pastoral epics. The 24 likes suggest the audience gets it—sometimes the shortest flight brings back the sweetest nectar.