This is Plahm at his most philosophically ambitious and formally compressed—a poem that attempts to narrate the transformation of a species in twenty-five lines. The title performs the poem’s argument before the first word: “New Hu-Man(ity)” uses the hyphen and parenthetical to break the word apart and reassemble it, revealing that “humanity” contains both “human” and “man” and that each can be extracted, examined, and evolved separately. The parenthetical “(ity)” is the suffix that converts a single person into a collective condition—the poem is about how one becomes many.
The opening inversion is the poem’s philosophical foundation: “Not just / part of eternity— / eternity now / a part of him.” The reversal is precise and radical. The traditional formulation places the individual inside the larger whole (we are part of eternity); Plahm reverses the containment, placing eternity inside the individual. This is not mystical hand-waving but a genuine philosophical reorientation: if eternity is part of you rather than you being part of it, then the cosmic is not distant but internal, not above but within.
The fire imagery connects to the catalog’s incendiary thread (“Incendium,” “Your Gravity,” “Time and Two Fires”) but here the fire serves evolution rather than love: “The spark / of humanity / becomes / an all-consuming flame, / devouring the self, / exploding the soul / through the universe.” The progression from spark to flame to devouring to exploding is a controlled demolition—each stage destroys a smaller container so the contents can occupy a larger one. The self is devoured so the soul can explode; the soul explodes so it can fill the universe. Destruction as expansion.
“Self-awareness everywhere— / dissolving into, intertwining with / cosmic awareness” is the poem’s central transformation, stated with clarity that borders on the scientific: individual consciousness doesn’t disappear but dissolves into and intertwines with something larger. The two verbs are carefully chosen—”dissolving” suggests the self losing its boundaries (like salt in water), while “intertwining” suggests the self maintaining its threads while weaving into a larger fabric. The new human is both dissolved and woven, both lost and found.
The poem’s most original image arrives in its quietest passage: “Vast distance / is never astronomical; / it is the silence / between two heartbeats.” This redefines the cosmos through the body rather than the telescope. The distance between galaxies is not measured in light-years but in the pause between cardiac contractions—the smallest, most intimate unit of biological time applied to the largest possible spatial scale. The implication is breathtaking: if the universe fits between heartbeats, then the new human carries the cosmos in the rhythm of being alive.
The closing imperative—”New hu-man— / evolve, listen, / feel the pulse / beating hearts everywhere— / living within, without, forever”—is both instruction and prophecy. The three commands (evolve, listen, feel) trace a progression from biological change through attention to empathy, and the final three words—”within, without, forever”—locate the new human in every possible dimension: inside the self, outside the self, and across all time.

A poem that accomplishes in twenty-five lines what most visionary writing requires books to attempt: a coherent narrative of spiritual evolution from individual spark to cosmic fusion. The compression is the poem’s primary achievement—every line advances the transformation, and there is no filler, no digression, no comic aside. This is Plahm writing without his usual tonal safety nets (humor, self-deprecation, pop-culture references), and the result is a poem of unusual purity and focus. The opening inversion—eternity becoming part of the individual rather than the reverse—is a genuine philosophical contribution, not merely a clever restatement. It reframes the relationship between the mortal and the infinite in a way that empowers rather than diminishes the human, which connects to the catalog’s broader project of finding the cosmic inside the domestic. The fire imagery is effectively deployed, borrowing from the “Incendium” thread without repeating it: where “Incendium” burned with erotic fire and “Your Gravity” burned with devotional fire, this poem burns with evolutionary fire—the flame that consumes the old form to produce the new one. The heartbeat image is the poem’s masterpiece—redefining astronomical distance as the silence between two heartbeats is a compression that rivals the best metaphysical poetry, and it earns its reach because the preceding stanzas have systematically collapsed the distinction between the personal and the cosmic. “Living within, without, forever” is a three-word manifesto that works as both spatial description (inside and outside) and temporal claim (eternally). Where the poem could push further is in its middle section, which stays in abstract philosophical territory without the concrete sensory detail that anchors Plahm’s strongest work—a single specific image of what the “new human” sees, hears, or touches during the transformation might have given the philosophy a body to inhabit. The “Self-awareness everywhere” line, while conceptually sound, reads as statement rather than image. But the poem’s brevity is also its discipline: it says what it needs to say and stops, which is itself a form of evolution—the poet who wrote 200-line epics here proves he can reshape the universe in 25 lines. A poem that practices the compression it preaches.