This piece occupies a unique formal space in Plahm’s catalog: it is almost entirely prose, deliberately flooding the page with the language of risk—idioms, colloquialisms, and gambling metaphors stacked so densely they become their own kind of music. The epigraph announces the poem’s self-awareness: “The fallacy of pursuit of an idea or an ideal, but not a tangible goal.” This is a poet who knows his love may be an abstraction, and who chooses to pursue it anyway. What follows is a breathless cascade of risk imagery: take a flyer, play with fire, toss the dice, leap of faith, shot in the dark, luck of the draw, pig in a poke, go for broke, fly close to the sun, Russian Roulette. The accumulation is the point—by heaping cliché upon cliché, Plahm demonstrates that the entire English language has been trying to describe this feeling and never quite succeeds. The escalation from gambling to Icarus to Mars to volcanic creation is thrilling in its ambition, and the pivot—”All of that is expressed in one relationship with another human”—performs a stunning compression, folding cosmic risk into intimate connection. The “Trust? Shit might as well play Russian Roulette” moment is vintage Plahm: profane, honest, funny, and terrifying in equal measure. The self-aware closing—”Life’s not just clichés, but it’s easy to say, we describe it as such, in a roundabout way”—acknowledges that the poem has been constructed entirely from borrowed language, and argues that this is not failure but recognition: we reach for clichés because the experience they describe is universal.

A poem that takes a genuine formal risk by building itself almost entirely from idioms and clichés—and then justifying that choice as its thesis. The cascade of gambling and danger metaphors creates a manic energy that suits the subject: the recklessness of loving without certainty. The escalation from dice to fire to Icarus to Mars to volcanic creation is ambitious and earns its payoff when the pivot line compresses all of it into “one relationship with another human”—a moment of rhetorical judo that makes the preceding excess feel purposeful. The Russian Roulette image is the poem’s sharpest moment, pairing trust with mortal risk in a way that is both darkly comic and emotionally precise, particularly for a poet whose body has played its own version of that game through AGS episodes. The self-aware closing is intelligent and honest, acknowledging the poem’s method while defending it. Where the piece is less successful is in its prose-heavy form—the lack of line breaks and rhythmic variation makes some passages read as essay rather than poem, and the sheer density of idioms occasionally tips from deliberate excess into fatigue. The epigraph, while conceptually sharp, somewhat telegraphs the poem’s conclusion before it arrives. The title “Again” is curiously understated for such an expansive piece—though it may signal that this risk-taking, this willingness to go for broke, is not a one-time act but a daily practice. A bold, intellectually playful piece that argues convincingly for the glory of the uncertain life.