This poem reads like a stand-up routine that keeps accidentally stumbling into profundity. Plahm opens with a rapid-fire catalog of physical wreckage—fake teeth, a nose broken twice (“Looks better that way, / I think”), scars that carry family stories—and frames these not as deficits but as credentials for what he coins “jagged charm.” The phrase itself is the poem’s central invention, a concept that redefines attractiveness as the accumulated evidence of having lived. The tone is pitch-perfect: self-aware without being self-pitying, funny without deflecting the genuine emotion underneath. The mirror passage—speaker and reflection grinning at each other like old drinking buddies—is among Plahm’s warmest images, suggesting a hard-won peace with aging. The teenage White Castle memory is a brilliant digression that grounds the poem in specific autobiography, and the mid-poem correction (“It was vermouth, / Not boxed wine”) is a masterstroke of comic naturalism that makes the entire poem feel unscripted and alive. The love confession (“But I do / Love You”) arrives with disarming casualness, deliberately undercutting its own gravity by first dismissing the poem as no Shakespeare. The closing invitation—”Let’s be / Messily / Human”—is the poem’s thesis statement, a philosophy of imperfection that the Muse ratifies with her knowing smile. A companion piece to “Foundation” in its celebration of bodily acceptance, but funnier, looser, and more generous in its embrace of the audience.

One of the most likable poems in the entire HoneyBeeBard catalog, and its 41 likes suggest the audience agrees. The poem’s greatest achievement is tonal: it sustains a conversational, self-effacing voice over a substantial length without once dropping into either sentimentality or cynicism—the two pitfalls that most “imperfection is beautiful” poems fall into. The “jagged charm” coinage gives the poem a conceptual spine that holds together what might otherwise feel like rambling, and the phrase has the sticky quality of something that could escape the poem and enter common usage. The mirror scene is genuinely funny and emotionally true—the image of speaker and reflection as co-conspirators rather than adversaries is a small revelation about the possibility of self-acceptance late in life. The White Castle digression, complete with its vermouth correction, is the kind of detail that can’t be invented—it carries the unmistakable scent of real memory, and its placement gives the poem breathing room before the emotional escalation. The “I know this ain’t no Shakespeare” passage is a calculated risk that works because it precedes the most direct love declaration in the poem; the deflection becomes a setup for sincerity. The closing philosophy—”Sometimes, / Beauty / Is unexpectedly / Found”—earns its simplicity through everything that precedes it. Minor weakness: the poem’s looseness occasionally tips into shapelessness, and a few stanzas could be cut without loss. But the warmth and wit carry the reader past any structural slack. A poem you’d want to have a drink with.