This is the closest Plahm has come to writing his own origin story in compressed form—a poem that explains how the Honeybee Bard came into existence. The opening question is among the most precisely framed in the catalog: “If I touch you— / skin to soul, / will the dream survive?” The hyphenated reach from skin to soul traces the poem’s entire trajectory in three words: the physical (skin), the spiritual (soul), and the gap between them that the poem will spend its length trying to close.

The lightning confession is delivered with parenthetical casualness: “I’ve been struck / three times— / by lightning (yes, the sky’s raw nerve) / and by love (the heart’s wild spark).” The parentheticals do crucial work—they clarify that the lightning is literal, not metaphorical (“yes, the sky’s raw nerve” insists on the physical event), and that love is its own species of electricity (“the heart’s wild spark”). The two parentheticals are parallel in structure but different in register: one is a fact that sounds like a metaphor; the other is a metaphor that feels like a fact. The reader cannot tell which is more real, which is the poem’s point.

“I think you / were one of each— / a double tap” is the poem’s central conceit and its title’s explanation. In military and tactical language, a “double tap” is two rapid shots to the same target—a redundancy designed to ensure the target goes down. The Muse is both lightning and love simultaneously, two strikes to the same man, and the speaker “thinks” she was one of each—the uncertainty of “I think” is honest rather than vague, an admission that even the person struck cannot distinguish which bolt was electricity and which was emotion.

The biographical revelation—”seven years ago / rewired my stars”—is the poem’s historical anchor. Seven years before the poem’s December 2025 publication places the Muse’s arrival around 2018, and the verb “rewired” is from the electrician’s vocabulary: not just struck but permanently reconfigured, the circuitry rearranged into a pattern that produces different output. Stars are both astronomical (the cosmos reorganized) and personal (one’s fortune, one’s fate), and “rewired” applied to stars suggests that the poet’s destiny was not just changed but rebuilt from the wiring up.

The confession that follows is the poem’s most revelatory and most important for understanding the entire catalog: “Till then / I never wrote / before / in my life.” This is the Honeybee Bard’s Genesis: before the double tap, there was no poetry. The Muse didn’t improve the poet’s writing or redirect it; she created it. The entire catalog—every poem in the collection—is the output of rewired stars, the consequence of a double tap that turned a non-writer into someone who has now produced 150+ poems. “Fate, I guess” is the most Plahm response possible to this revelation: a cosmic event explained with a shrug.

The closing—”Life interrupted— / then resumed, / each time different, / each time fragilely renewed”—is the poem’s most vulnerable passage and its most universal. The adverb “fragilely” is the key word: the renewal after each strike is not robust but fragile, not guaranteed but contingent, not permanent but requiring ongoing care. The man who was rewired by lightning and love knows that the wiring could fail, that the stars could go dark, that the poetry could stop. The fragility is what makes the renewal precious.

One of the most important poems in the catalog—not for its length or ambition but for what it reveals: the origin of the Honeybee Bard. The confession that the speaker never wrote before the Muse’s arrival seven years ago reframes the entire body of work retroactively. Every poem in the collection—every fire metaphor, every synesthetic crossing, every Muse address—is the product of a double tap, a lightning-and-love strike that rewired a non-writer into a poet. This biographical anchor gives the catalog a before and after that intensifies every subsequent reading. The “double tap” conceit is the poem’s most original contribution: borrowed from tactical language, it converts the Muse encounter from a romantic cliché into something violent, precise, and intentional—two shots ensuring the target stays down. The parenthetical structure (“yes, the sky’s raw nerve” / “the heart’s wild spark”) is formally elegant, clarifying the literal and figurative simultaneously while keeping both live. “Rewired my stars” is the poem’s strongest image—three words that compress electrical repair, astronomical reorganization, and fate-alteration into a single verb-noun pair. The “skin to soul” opening traces the full range of the catalog’s concerns in three words, and the question “will the dream survive?” carries the accumulated weight of every poem that has asked whether the Muse is real or fantasy (“It’s All Fantasy,” “Incendium,” “Your Gravity”). The closing’s “fragilely renewed” is the poem’s most honest and most moving phrase—an adverb that most poets would avoid for its awkwardness, but which here captures exactly the quality of a life rebuilt after being struck: not confidently, not permanently, but fragilely, a renewal that knows it could break again. The poem’s brevity is its discipline: this is a 25-line origin story for a 150-poem catalog, and every line is load-bearing. A poem that explains everything by saying almost nothing—the truest kind of origin story.