This is Plahm at his most compressed and his most daring. The entire poem is a single sentence stretched across eight lines, and each proper noun—George Floyd, Pink Floyd, George the cat—carries a universe of association that the poem refuses to unpack, trusting the reader to do the work. The word “Way before” establishes deep temporal perspective, and the progression from civil rights tragedy to psychedelic rock to mischievous house cat traces a deliberate descent from the monumental to the intimate, from the public to the private, from the dead to the vibrantly alive. The connective tissue is the name itself: “Floyd” and “George” recombine across the lines like a shuffled deck, and the final image—”just / George / the mischievous tabby cat”—lands with a quietness that is the poem’s entire argument. After the weight of history and the weight of art, what remains is the small, warm, present-tense reality of a cat being mischievous. The word “just” does enormous work: it is simultaneously diminishing (“merely a cat”) and elevating (“this is enough”). The poem refuses to moralize about Floyd’s death or mythologize Pink Floyd’s legacy; it simply places them in sequence and lets the reader feel the vertigo of living in a world where all three Georges coexist in memory. This is a poem about scale—the scale of grief, the scale of art, and the scale of a tabby cat who knows nothing of either.

A micro-poem that punches far above its word count. The audacity of placing George Floyd, Pink Floyd, and a tabby cat in a single sentence is the kind of move that either fails spectacularly or succeeds through sheer compression—and here it succeeds. The poem’s refusal to comment, explain, or moralize is its greatest strength; it trusts the collision of names to generate meaning without authorial intervention. The temporal architecture—”Way before” to “after” to “just”—creates a complete narrative arc in eight lines, moving from historical tragedy through cultural landmark to domestic present with the efficiency of a haiku’s pivot. The word “mischievous” is the poem’s only adjective and its only warmth, and it does the crucial work of making George the cat a character rather than a symbol—this is a real cat doing real cat things, indifferent to the weight of his borrowed name. Where the poem invites debate is in its juxtaposition: some readers may find the placement of George Floyd alongside a band and a pet reductive, while others will recognize the deliberate vertigo as the poem’s subject—we live with tragedy and trivia in the same consciousness, and poetry is one of the few forms honest enough to say so. The brevity is both the poem’s power and its limitation; at eight lines, it is more provocation than exploration, more spark than fire. But the spark is genuine, and the image of the mischievous tabby outlasting both Floyds and both Georges is quietly devastating in its insistence on the persistence of small, alive things.