Plahm opens with a preamble that is itself a poetics: “I’ve read a lot about the word / But I think, personally, / It just boils down to this.” The word “personally” is the key—after research, after reading, the poet discards the dictionary and offers his own definition. This is the Honeybee Bard’s method throughout the catalog: encounter the received wisdom, respect it, then replace it with lived experience.

The definition that follows is genuinely interesting: “Our lives / Are a rhapsody / A musical communication / A harmonic but sometimes dissonant / arrangement and composition / That we gift or dispense / To those we know or / To those we happenstance.” The phrase “those we happenstance” is a characteristic Plahm coinage—converting a noun into a verb, inventing grammar to describe what existing grammar can’t: the people we encounter by accident, the strangers who receive our music without either party choosing the concert. The inclusion of dissonance alongside harmony is the definition’s most honest element: a rhapsody is not a lullaby; it contains clashing chords, emotional lows, depths of distress alongside joys of living. The poem insists on the full spectrum rather than the idealized version.

The Muse section performs the usual Plahm pivot from universal to personal: “Just as your influence is to me. / Uplifting and joyfully rhythmic / The darker parts within me / Brought to light / Dispersed and alleviated.” The Muse’s contribution is not to add brightness but to disperse darkness—a distinction that matters. She doesn’t layer happiness on top of pain; she enters the dark places and opens them to light. “A symphony that has / Enriched my existence / Brought music to my senses” extends the musical metaphor while keeping the language grounded in the body: music to the senses, not to the mind. The enrichment is sensory before it is intellectual.

The Joni Mitchell invocation—”It is music, in that it comes from the soul”—is the poem’s cultural anchor and its most revealing quotation. Mitchell is Plahm’s recurring touchstone (she appeared in “The Shadow Twin to Queen of My Morning” as Joni’s voice crackling on the radio), and her authority as painter-poet-musician gives the poem’s argument external validation: if Joni says music comes from the soul, and if life is a rhapsody, then living is itself a form of music-making.

The comic deflation—”Gods big bite in our ass”—is vintage Plahm, arriving after the Joni passage to prevent the philosophy from floating away. The bite is not punishment but motivation, the cosmic kick that gets humans moving. “Hell no. / It’s just simply stupid humans” is the poem’s most direct statement, refusing to blame God for human dysfunction—a position consistent with “I’m Tired” and “The Crockett Sprocket Machine.”

The closing prose statement redefines rhapsody one final time: “I do not accept the definition of rhapsody as being in a state of ecstasy. I think it’s a state of being in which you recognize there is a power greater than you. / An influence.” The word “influence” closing the entire poem connects directly to the Muse: she is the power greater than the speaker, and recognizing her as such—not ecstasy but recognition—is what makes his life a rhapsody. The redefinition is the poem’s most original contribution: rhapsody as humility rather than rapture, as acknowledgment rather than abandon.