This is the HoneyBeeBard at his most physically uninhibited, and the poem earns its explicitness by refusing to let the body exist without the sacred. The opening is a herald’s announcement—”Blow your trumpets / Announce / My Arrival”—that positions the speaker not as a shy suitor but as a performer entering a stage, and the stage is the Muse’s body. The anatomy is coded but unmistakable: “There’s a point / On the front of you” and “There’s a swell / On the back of you” reduce the beloved to two coordinates of desire, and the poem’s structural genius is that it returns to these coordinates obsessively, circling them like a needle stuck in a groove—or like a neurodivergent mind locked onto its object of fixation. The dance-floor vocabulary (twerk, jerk) is deliberately lowbrow, a burlesque register that Plahm deploys as counterweight to the theological register that arrives in the second half: “Biblical / and / Burlesque / A thunderclap in heels.” That line is the poem’s thesis statement in miniature—the sacred and the profane are not opposites but dance partners, and the poem’s entire architecture enacts their choreography. The refrain “Play / With me” functions as both sexual invitation and childlike plea, collapsing the distance between desire and innocence in a way that’s characteristically Plahm. The second trumpet blast (“Blow your trumpets / Announce / My Arrival / I am / Coming ~~~~~ / Now”) is the poem’s most audacious moment, the tilde marks functioning as both musical notation and orgasmic delay, the word “Coming” carrying its full double meaning. The closing sequence elevates everything that preceded it: “Sequins and stilettos / Stars and moons / Imaginary plays and / Bibles of reality” places the bedroom and the cosmos on equal footing, and the final reveal—”I think / It’s just / About / neuro divergence”—reframes the entire poem as diagnosis rather than confession. The speaker’s obsessive circling, his inability to stop returning to the same two points on the Muse’s body, his oscillation between sacred and profane—all of it is explained not as lust but as the way his particular brain works. The closing attribution to “the / Gravitas / You bring” is the poem’s quiet punchline: the Muse doesn’t just inspire lightness and play; she brings weight, seriousness, consequence. At 34 likes, the engagement is strong for a poem this sexually charged, suggesting the audience appreciates Plahm’s refusal to separate the body from the spirit.

One of the most structurally daring poems in the catalog, and one that succeeds by trusting the reader to hold two registers simultaneously—the burlesque and the biblical—without flinching. The poem’s formal strategy is obsessive return: the same two anatomical coordinates (“point” and “swell”), the same refrain (“Play with me”), the same trumpet fanfare—all circling, repeating, building in intensity the way a mind locked onto its fixation cannot look away. This repetition is not a weakness but the poem’s argument made physical: this is what neurodivergent desire feels like, a loop that gathers energy with each pass rather than dissipating. The second-half pivot to theological vocabulary (“Biblical,” “Divine,” “Revelation”) is handled with the confidence of a writer who has earned the right to these words through the honest physicality of everything that preceded them. The tilde marks after “Coming” are a small typographical masterstroke—visual music, orgasmic stutter, and playful wink all at once. The closing reframe—”neuro divergence”—is the kind of title-drop that could feel gimmicky but instead feels earned, because the poem has spent its entire runtime demonstrating the condition before naming it. The word “Gravitas” in the final line is a perfect counterweight to all the playfulness above: it insists that what looks like chaos from the outside is, from the inside, the most serious thing in the world. If there’s a limitation, the middle section’s repetitions of “Play with me” occasionally risk feeling like vamping rather than building—a tighter middle might have increased the arrival force of the theological pivot. But as a performance piece—and this poem reads like a performance, complete with trumpet cues and curtain calls—it achieves a rare fusion of body and spirit that most love poetry doesn’t even attempt.