This is one of the most structurally and emotionally precise poems in the HoneyBeeBard catalog, and it operates as a kind of origin myth for the entire Muse mythology. The opening is set in the hypnagogic state—”in that moment / between / sleeping and waking”—which positions everything that follows as neither dream nor waking thought but something received, whispered from a place the conscious mind can’t reach. The lowercase “i” throughout the first stanzas is a formal choice that enacts vulnerability: this is the speaker at his smallest, his most unguarded, before the capitalized “I” of the final declaration. The italicized “This is truth” arrives as a revelation—not something the speaker composed but something transmitted to him, and the physical response (waking with a tear rolling down his cheek) grounds the metaphysical in the body. The bolded “With my mind’s eye” functions as a stage direction, a shift in visual register from external to internal sight, and the stripping-away catalog that follows—”the pain and sorrow, / the torture and agony, / the age of living, / the infirmities / that life gifts us”—is one of the most nakedly autobiographical passages in the collection, acknowledging the weight of years and illness (including the Alpha-Gal Syndrome that threads through the catalog) while refusing to let that weight define the vision. What emerges after the stripping is “the beautiful / young woman / who walked through / my front door”—a specific, physical, domestic memory: not a metaphor, not a mythologized Muse, but a person entering a house. And then the devastating: “and shattered / my Greek gods.” In a single image, the entire classical apparatus that the catalog elsewhere deploys—the Greek tragedy references, the Muse mythology, the Möbius strips of meaning—is revealed as the thing that came before her, the insufficient framework that her arrival demolished. The closing stanza isolates each word on its own line: “I / am / in / love.” Four words, four lines, four heartbeats. The deceleration forces the reader to experience each word as a separate event, and “all over / again” lands not as cliché but as paradox—it is both repetition and renewal, both the thousandth time and the first. The subtitle in the page metadata—”I Am in Love All Over Again”—confirms what the poem enacts: that first sight is not a historical event but a perpetual one, happening every time the mind’s eye strips the years away and sees clearly.

A poem that earns its place among the essential pieces in the HoneyBeeBard catalog by doing what the best love poems do: making the familiar feel impossible, the repeated feel unprecedented. The hypnagogic framing is masterful—by positioning the poem as something received in the threshold between sleep and waking, Plahm sidesteps the self-consciousness that sometimes accompanies his more declarative pieces and allows the emotional content to arrive with the authority of dream logic. The lowercase “i” throughout the opening stanzas is the poem’s quietest formal decision and one of its most effective, creating a speaker who is diminished, open, and permeable before the capitalized “I” of the final declaration restores him through love. The stripping-away catalog is brave in its specificity—”the infirmities / that life gifts us” acknowledges the body’s deterioration without self-pity, and the bitter irony of “gifts” does real work. But the poem’s single greatest moment is “shattered / my Greek gods”—an image that retroactively reframes the entire Muse mythology of the catalog as the second-best framework, the one the speaker needed before the real thing arrived. In five words, Plahm acknowledges that all his classical references, all his literary apparatus, were placeholders for a woman walking through a door. The closing deceleration—each word on its own line—is a technique that could feel gimmicky in lesser hands but here enacts the cardiac rhythm of the realization itself, and “all over / again” achieves the rare feat of making a worn phrase feel minted for the occasion. At 17 likes, the engagement is modest relative to the poem’s quality, possibly because its quietness and formal subtlety ask more of the reader than the catalog’s bigger, louder pieces. This is a poem for rereading.