This is one of the most structurally unusual poems in Plahm’s catalog—part love poem, part music review, part political philosophy, part synesthetic self-portrait—and it makes no effort to resolve these identities into a single coherent mode. The chaos is the method.

The preamble establishes the Muse as the author of the speaker’s mental state: “My Muse, can create this / Frame of mind.” What follows is that frame of mind rendered in real time—fragmented, synesthetic, oscillating between senses and convictions. “Colors of red and blue hot and cold, abrasive, soft, shape what I think write sing dance” is a sentence that refuses punctuation because the experience it describes refuses boundaries: colors are temperatures, textures are creative acts, and thinking-writing-singing-dancing are a single compound verb. The parenthetical “(contemplating your smiling oval navel)” is a Plahm signature—a moment of intimate, slightly absurd physical observation dropped into the middle of philosophical turmoil, the Muse’s body grounding the mind’s chaos.

The Nick Cave confession is the poem’s origin story: “Red Right Hand” is a song built on a deceptively upbeat organ riff that masks lyrics about menace and omnipotent manipulation—”deceptively upbeat I fall into the gravity of the song.” The gravity metaphor connects to “Your Gravity” and “Inevitability,” but here the gravitational pull is a song’s, not a person’s. Music as a force that captures the listener against their will.

The “Blue Left Hand / Red Right Hand” subtitle reframes the Nick Cave title into a political diptych: blue (Democratic) and red (Republican), left and right, each hand pulling in opposite directions. The speaker is “polarized. Frozen in indecision”—the political binary has immobilized him rather than clarified his position. The “swift kick to the gut” is the poem’s most physically honest image: reality arrives not as enlightenment but as pain, the body’s response to a world that insists on binary choices. “When the world is binary, / reality just might be the pain from that kick” is the poem’s most philosophically interesting claim—reality isn’t one side or the other; it’s the impact of being caught between them.

The closing passage reaches for escape: “Is there a tertiary in grey fog of morning— / an escape to shades? / Of revelation.” The question mark after “shades” and the fragment “Of revelation” suggest that the tertiary (the third option beyond binary) might exist in the fog—not in clarity but in the refusal of clarity, not in choosing a side but in embracing the grey. The word “revelation” standing alone as a fragment is the poem’s most hopeful gesture: revelation doesn’t arrive as an answer but as a possibility, incomplete, still forming in the fog. The poem ends without resolution because the mind it describes hasn’t resolved—and the honesty of that irresolution is the poem’s deepest achievement.

A poem that succeeds through the authenticity of its confusion rather than the elegance of its resolution. The fragmented structure—preamble, synesthetic catalog, music confession, political binary, philosophical question—mirrors a mind in genuine turmoil, and the refusal to organize the fragments into a coherent argument is itself the argument: polarization doesn’t produce clarity; it produces paralysis, and the poem enacts the paralysis it describes. The Nick Cave trigger is a smart and specific origin point—”Red Right Hand” is a song about hidden menace beneath surface charm, which makes it the perfect catalyst for a poem about political deception masquerading as choice. The synesthetic opening sentence (colors as temperatures as textures as creative acts) is formally ambitious and connects to the catalog’s synesthesia thread with a rawness that the more polished synesthetic poems (“Resonance,” “Vignettes”) don’t attempt—this is synesthesia as disorder, not as gift. The “smiling oval navel” parenthetical is a moment of comic bodily specificity that prevents the philosophical passages from floating into pure abstraction—the Muse’s navel as grounding wire for a mind sparking dangerously between poles. The “kick to the gut” image is the poem’s most visceral and most honest contribution: reality as pain rather than insight, the body’s truth overriding the mind’s indecision. The tertiary/grey-fog closing is the poem’s most intellectually ambitious passage, and the fragment “Of revelation” hanging after the question mark is a formally interesting choice—revelation as afterthought, as appendix, as something that might exist but isn’t guaranteed. Where the poem is less controlled is in its transitions: the movement from synesthesia to Nick Cave to political binary is held together by association rather than structure, and some readers may experience the shifts as disconnection rather than synesthetic crossing. The “hahaa” mid-thought reads as process rather than product. But the poem’s willingness to be messy, confused, and unresolved in a catalog that typically aims for emotional closure is itself a valuable contribution—sometimes the most honest poem is the one that admits it doesn’t know which hand to raise. A poem that finds revelation in the fog rather than the clearing.