The subtitle is the poem’s hidden engine: “The word I have never… / TO.” The preposition “TO” is the smallest, most functional word in the English language, and yet it’s the one the speaker has never delivered. Every desire in the poem is directed at a “you” but has never been spoken to that “you”—the entire catalog of wants exists in the poet’s mind, on the page, everywhere except in the beloved’s ears. This reframes the poem from a love letter into an undelivered one, a message written but never sent, an envelope addressed but never mailed. It connects to the catalog’s recurring motif of love as a one-directional broadcast (“It’s All Fantasy,” “Perfume on a Stranger’s Coat,” the paper-rocket poems).

The six-stanza catalog follows a deliberate progression. “Show me beauty in the simplest things” opens with perception—the speaker asking the Muse to recalibrate his vision, to help him see dew on petals, hear a child’s laughter, feel the quietude of dawn. “Teach me loyalty” moves from seeing to commitment—a bond, a promise, a trust. “Inspire courage” escalates to action—standing tall against fear. “Kindle kindness” shifts from self-directed to outward—seeing the world through gentle eyes, touching souls. “Be the light” asks the Muse to serve as navigation—beacon, hope, star. “Serve as a compass” completes the progression: from perception through character to guidance, the Muse has been asked to reshape the speaker from the eyes inward and from the heart outward.

The prose instruction—”Invite that individual that can be a Muse to you, / And be a Muse to someone that needs your influence”—breaks the poem’s lyric register to deliver direct counsel. The Muse relationship is declared bilateral: “a two-way street. Give and take.” This is a rare moment in the catalog where the speaker steps outside the Muse dynamic to recommend it to others, converting personal experience into advice.

The closing pivot to humor is vintage Plahm: “I may not reach the stars, / But, I bought my ticket to Mars. / At 71, I might get thar, / Even if it’s in a jar.” The forced rhyme (Mars/thar/jar), the invented spelling (“thar”), and the cremation joke (arriving on Mars as ashes in a jar) are the poem’s comic relief after six stanzas of earnest aspiration. The “Hahaa” is the sound of a man laughing at his own mortality, and the closing “Love You, / Dave” is the catalog’s most intimate sign-off—not the Honeybee Bard, not the poet, just Dave.

A poem whose subtitle carries more weight than the body initially suggests. The revelation that “TO” is the word never spoken reframes a straightforward catalog of aspirations into something more complicated and more poignant: every desire listed is one the speaker has kept to himself, directed at a “you” who has never heard any of it. This gap between the written and the spoken—the poem exists, but the conversation doesn’t—is the catalog’s most persistent wound, and naming the missing preposition with such precision (“TO”) gives that wound a grammatical specificity it hasn’t had before. The six-stanza catalog is well-structured, each stanza assigned a different verb (show, teach, inspire, kindle, be, serve) that traces a complete education from perception through character to navigation. The progression from “show me beauty” (passive, receptive) to “serve as a compass” (active, directional) mirrors the maturation the speaker is requesting: he begins by asking to be shown and ends by asking to be guided, which means the Muse’s role evolves across the poem from teacher to navigator. The prose counsel about the Muse relationship being a two-way street is the poem’s most practical and most generous moment—the speaker steps out of his own longing to offer the reader the same possibility. The Mars joke is a well-timed comic dismount: after six stanzas of earned sincerity, the forced rhyme and cremation humor release the pressure without undermining it. “Even if it’s in a jar” is a man making peace with mortality through a one-liner, which is as honest a response to aging as any in the catalog. Where the poem stays in familiar territory is in the six central stanzas, which rely on a more conventional inspirational register (beauty in simplest things, loyalty steadfast and true, courage to stand tall) than the catalog’s most distinctive work typically produces. The imagery—dew on petals, gales of fear, thickest fog—is well-crafted but doesn’t carry the imagistic surprise of Plahm’s strongest pieces. But the subtitle saves everything: once you understand that “TO” is the missing word, the entire poem reshapes itself from aspiration into confession, and the sign-off “Love You, / Dave” becomes the closest the poet has ever come to saying it—on paper, to no one, to everyone, to her.