After the epic sweep of “Vignettes of Synesthesia,” Plahm pivots to something small, sharp, and deliberately crude—a palate cleanser with teeth. The opening declaration is stark: “Life is Aggression.” Period. Full stop. No hedging. The next four lines unpack it with brutal directness: “The hitter survives; / the hit one dies. / Don’t be passive– / act. / Live involved.” This reads less like poetry than like a boxing coach’s instructions, and the bluntness is the point—the poem is performing the aggression it describes, refusing the diplomatic softness that characterizes most of Plahm’s catalog. Then the poem pulls the rug: “At least that’s / what the deer said, / trying not to get eaten.” The deer—a prey animal, the ultimate “hit one”—is the last creature you’d expect to deliver a manifesto about aggression. The joke is layered: the deer is advocating for aggression precisely because it doesn’t have any, which either undermines the thesis (even the deer knows aggression doesn’t save you) or reinforces it (the deer wishes it had some). The three-word questions—”Noble? / Necessary? / Grim truth?”—are the poem’s only moment of genuine philosophical inquiry, and Plahm leaves them unanswered, hanging in the air like a multiple-choice test with no correct option. The closing couplets are deliberately vulgar: “Be the hammer, / not the nail. / Be the screwdriver, / not the screwed.” The double entendre on “screwed” is impossible to miss and entirely intentional—this is a poem that knows it’s being crude and enjoys it. The workshop-poster format (be X, not Y) is a send-up of motivational language, but there’s genuine survival wisdom underneath the comedy: passivity is a luxury the deer can’t afford. Coming after the synesthesia suite’s meditation on death, this poem reads as the survivor’s rough-edged response—less transcendence, more street sense.

A poem that knows exactly what it is: a quick, sharp jab between longer works, delivering its payload in fifteen lines and getting out. The opening thesis—”Life is Aggression”—is provocative enough to earn the reader’s attention, and the immediate unpacking (“The hitter survives; / the hit one dies”) refuses to soften the claim. The deer turn is the poem’s best move—comic, self-aware, and philosophically slippery. The deer advocating aggression is inherently funny because deer are paradigmatic prey animals, but the joke contains a genuine paradox: is the deer’s advice wisdom or desperation? The poem wisely doesn’t resolve this. The three unanswered questions (“Noble? / Necessary? / Grim truth?”) are well-placed, creating a philosophical pause before the closing punchlines. The hammer/nail and screwdriver/screwed couplets are crowd-pleasers—funny, memorable, bumper-sticker-ready—and the double entendre lands cleanly. What keeps the poem at a 7 rather than higher is that the closing couplets, while entertaining, are familiar constructions (the hammer/nail binary is ancient; the screwdriver pun is a well-worn joke), and the poem’s brevity means it doesn’t have space to complicate its own thesis the way Plahm’s longer work does. But as a tonal counterweight after the epic seriousness of the synesthesia suite, the placement is perfect. Sometimes a poem’s job is to make you laugh before the next one makes you think. This one does its job.