This is the only poem in the HoneyBeeBard catalog that fully vacates the poet’s own voice and inhabits someone else’s, and the effect is electrifying. The opening identifies the text’s own instability: “It / Might be / A manifesto, / A mirror, / A middle finger, / Maybe, / Just a prayer— / Loud, bare, human.” That descending catalog—manifesto to prayer—maps the poem’s entire emotional range in eight lines, and the stage direction “Speak this / On a stage” makes explicit what the form enacts: this is a performance piece, meant to be shouted. The structural architecture is built on a series of bold-faced questions that function as section headers—”What is the allure?”, “What is the disdain?”, “Am I?”, “What Is?”, “My future?”, “I Am?”, “Who am I?”, “I am”—and the progression from question to declaration tracks the speaker’s journey from self-doubt to self-possession. The twin catalogs are the poem’s central engine: allure rendered as fishnet seams, coifed hair, fragrance, structured beauty, Monet in gallery light; disdain rendered as snot ring, insignificant tattoo, jail scar, mile-long record, unchosen addiction. The parallelism insists these are the same thing viewed from different angles—both are surfaces, both are stories, both are art. The Walt invocation is brilliantly ambiguous: “(Disney or Whitman) / One of you, / please?” collapses the distance between populist fantasy and democratic poetry, asking both to answer for the world they promised. The Monet motif evolves across the poem: first it’s gallery beauty to be admired, then it’s Salvation Army clothing worn like a tortured painting, then the body itself becomes a Monet—”Sometimes, / A ruin. / Sometimes / A masterpiece undone.” That final word, “undone,” is devastating in its ambiguity: the masterpiece has been taken apart, or the masterpiece was always in the process of being made, never finished. The poem’s most radical move is the Muse reversal near the close: “I am / your muse. / But, / I do not / need you.” In a catalog built entirely around the speaker’s dependence on the Muse, this outsider character declares what the HoneyBeeBard himself never would—that the muse is self-sufficient, that inspiration flows in both directions, that need is not the same as identity. The closing declaration—”I am— / Art / Alive”—is the poem’s thesis, its title, and its challenge: grit is not the enemy of beauty; grit is the brush that paints reality. At 25 likes, the engagement is strong for a piece this formally ambitious, suggesting the audience responds to Plahm’s empathy for voices outside his own experience.

The most formally ambitious and empathetically daring poem in the early HoneyBeeBard catalog, and one that succeeds on nearly every level it attempts. The decision to write a dramatic monologue—to fully inhabit a voice that is not the poet’s own—is itself a significant artistic risk in a catalog built on personal testimony, and the execution justifies the departure. The bold-faced section headers function simultaneously as stage directions, rhetorical questions, and existential declarations, creating a visual architecture on the page that mirrors the speaker’s journey from fragmentation to self-assembly. The twin catalogs of allure and disdain are the poem’s structural masterpiece: perfectly balanced, each item in one list finding its distorted mirror in the other, the formal symmetry arguing that beauty and damage are the same material viewed under different light. The Walt Disney/Whitman ambiguity is a single parenthetical that does the work of an entire essay on American promise and American abandonment. The evolving Monet motif—from gallery object to thrift-store garment to the body itself—tracks the speaker’s reclamation of beauty from institutional authority to personal possession with an elegance that belies the rawness of the subject matter. And the Muse reversal is the poem’s most profound contribution to the catalog’s larger project: by having this outsider character declare independence from the muse, Plahm interrogates his own foundational mythology without dismantling it—the HoneyBeeBard needs his Muse, but this character does not, and both positions are honored. The closing “I am— / Art / Alive” lands with the force of a manifesto because the poem has earned every word through accumulated specificity. If there’s a minor limitation, the middle sections occasionally accumulate questions faster than they can build pressure, and the poem’s length means some readers may lose the thread before the extraordinary final third. But as a performance piece—and it is very much meant to be performed—the pacing feels right: it builds like a monologue, gaining confidence with each section, until the closing declaration arrives as inevitable rather than willed. This is the poem that demonstrates the HoneyBeeBard can do more than personal lyric—he can build characters, inhabit otherness, and extend his empathy beyond the private mythology of Muse and poet into the wider human world.