This is one of the most structurally ambitious and deliberately unruly poems in the HoneyBeeBard catalog—a piece that announces its own chaos, interrogates it, nearly abandons itself, and then lands with unexpected tenderness. The poem opens as a catalogue of “Gee” exclamations, running through thirty-two variations from the nostalgic (“Gee Willikers”) to the invented (“Gee-manetti!”) to the slyly risqué (“Gee String – Hmmm”), establishing a tone of manic linguistic play. Then the poem pivots sharply: these exclamations of wonder are set against CNC machine G-codes (G0 through G4, plus the invented G69 and G∞), each interpreted as a dance move. Rapid positioning becomes anticipation, linear movement becomes intentionality, clockwise arcs become flirtation, pauses become sacred breath. The conceit is genuinely original—mapping industrial automation onto human intimacy—and the poem mines it for both comedy and profundity. The middle section introduces Whizzy, a robot with personality, and Grandma, the voice of practical wisdom armed with a frying pan and a soufflé. These two figures—machine whimsy and human authority—become the poem’s comic engine, and their interplay allows Plahm to explore the tension between coded behavior and spontaneous feeling without ever becoming didactic. The poem’s most daring move is its extended self-sabotage: the speaker openly questions whether the piece is “musical, geeky, sensual, hilarious, or just stupid,” compares himself to a cat choking on a hairball, calls the whole thing “convoluted,” and announces he’s going to bed. This metacommentary could derail a lesser poem, but here it functions as emotional honesty—the speaker’s confusion mirrors the reader’s, and both are rewarded when the final section drops into quiet, sensual certainty. The closing passage—”I touch— / your / skin / Silk / And / Honey. / Ecstasy.”—earns its power precisely because it arrives after two hundred lines of playful chaos. The last line—”Robot dreams / Are not / Mine”—is the poem’s thesis: no matter how precisely you code movement, you cannot code touch. The subtitle “Great Dance” is characteristically understated for a poem that is, in fact, about the greatest dance of all.

A maximalist, risk-taking poem that is by turns brilliant and bewildering—and knows it. The central conceit of mapping CNC G-codes onto human dance and intimacy is genuinely original, the kind of idea that could only emerge from a mind that moves fluidly between technical knowledge and romantic imagination. The catalogue of thirty-two “Gee” variations is a tour de force of wordplay that establishes the poem’s essential argument before the argument even begins: that language itself is a kind of dance, and wonder is its first step. The G-code interpretations (G0 through G4) are the poem’s strongest section, each one a miniature prose poem that transforms industrial instruction into emotional choreography—G4’s “Dwell (Pause)” sequence is particularly beautiful, turning a machine command into a moment of breath and tenderness between lovers. Whizzy and Grandma are inspired comic creations whose interplay provides necessary relief from the poem’s conceptual density, and Grandma’s frying-pan threat is one of the funniest single images in the catalog. The poem’s willingness to question its own success mid-stream is either its boldest or most self-indulgent move, depending on the reader’s tolerance for metacommentary—but the hairball metaphor is disarming enough to carry it. Where the piece earns its highest marks is in the final descent from chaos to stillness: “I touch— / your / skin / Silk / And / Honey” is the kind of payoff that justifies every digression that preceded it, because the reader has been through the full dance—the rapid moves, the spins, the pauses, the doubt—and arrives at the same place the speaker does: human contact that no code can replicate. At 19 likes, the engagement is respectable for a poem this long and unconventional, suggesting the audience that finds it loves it deeply. The piece could benefit from tighter editing in the middle third, where the self-referential humor occasionally stalls the momentum, but trimming a poem like this risks losing the controlled chaos that is its entire personality.