This is Plahm’s most directly political poem in the catalog, and its power lies in its structural simplicity: complaint, then remedy, then choice. The opening is a cascade of exhaustion, each line adding one more straw to the breaking back: “deaf ears / blind eyes / ignorant knowledge / vacant emotion / useless vocation / baseless accusations, / normalized dysfunction, / corruption normalized.” The list is carefully ordered—it begins with the body’s failures (ears that don’t hear, eyes that don’t see) and progresses to the social body’s failures (dysfunction made normal, corruption rebranded as standard practice). The chiasmus of “normalized dysfunction” and “corruption normalized” is a formal mirror that captures how completely the problem has inverted itself: the abnormal has become normal, and the corrupt has become the baseline.

“Our complicity in a handshake” is the poem’s most incisive line—it implicates everyone, including the speaker. The handshake is simultaneously the gesture of agreement, the symbol of a deal, and the means by which corruption is transmitted from one person to the next. We are all shaking hands with the problem. This is labeled “politics of ambition”—ambition not in the aspirational sense but in the corrosive sense: ambition as the engine of self-serving power.

The pivot arrives as two questions: “Where do we go? / How do we unite?” These are genuine questions, not rhetorical ones, and the poem answers them not with ideology but with action verbs: “Get educated. / Teach the ignorant. / Revive reality. / Prosecute corruption. / Expose those who preach falsehood.” Each instruction escalates in difficulty and courage: educating yourself is private; teaching is interpersonal; reviving reality is cultural; prosecuting corruption is institutional; exposing falsehood is dangerous. The progression traces a path from the individual to the systemic.

The most striking instruction is also the simplest: “Go to the library. Check out some books. It’s free.” After the elevated rhetoric of prosecution and exposure, the poem drops to the most mundane, most democratic, most accessible act: walking into a public library and reading for free. The three-word sentence “It’s free” carries enormous weight—in a poem about corruption and ambition, the antidote costs nothing. Knowledge is the one resource that doesn’t require a handshake.

The “politics of compassion” label arrives to close the remedy section, forming a structural pair with “politics of ambition.” The poem’s argument is not left versus right but two fundamentally different engines for society: ambition (self-serving) versus compassion (community-serving). The closing stanza frames the choice as existential: “Hope for the future / vs. / the cynicism of defeat.” The “vs.” standing alone on its own line creates a visual face-off, two philosophies staring each other down. The final instruction—”Be dedicated to knowledge and truth”—is the poem’s thesis compressed to seven words. The TPUSA sign-off is a personal commitment made public, converting the poem from observation into invitation.

A poem that earns its anger through structure rather than volume. The two-column framework—politics of ambition versus politics of compassion—gives the piece an architectural clarity that most political poems lack: it doesn’t just complain; it diagnoses, prescribes, and names both the disease and the cure. The opening exhaustion cascade is well-paced, each line adding specificity to the tiredness until “our complicity in a handshake” turns the accusation inward, implicating speaker and reader alike—a move that prevents the poem from becoming merely a finger pointed at others. The chiasmus of “normalized dysfunction” and “corruption normalized” is formally elegant and intellectually sharp, capturing how deeply the abnormal has embedded itself into daily life. The library instruction is the poem’s most original and most moving moment: after all the grand imperatives (prosecute, expose, revive), the suggestion to walk into a free public building and read a book is both anti-climactic and profoundly democratic—a reminder that the tools for resistance are already available and cost nothing. Where the poem is less successful as a literary object is in its middle section, which relies on imperative statements (“Get educated,” “Teach the ignorant”) that carry the force of a manifesto but not the imagistic surprise of Plahm’s strongest work. The catalog of instructions reads more like an op-ed than a poem—each line makes its point but doesn’t make it sing. The “politics of ambition” / “politics of compassion” labels, while structurally effective, feel like headings rather than images. The TPUSA sign-off personalizes the commitment but may narrow the poem’s appeal to a specific political orientation when the preceding stanzas had achieved something more universal. But the poem knows what it wants to be—a call to action, not a meditation—and on those terms it is direct, sincere, and structurally sound. The library line alone redeems any roughness: in a world of paid subscriptions, paywalled truth, and monetized influence, the reminder that knowledge is free is itself an act of compassion.