taste of honey

reviews & ratings of
this month's new works

08 October 2025

After an Excellent Workout / Uncorked Champagne

★★★★½
9/10
Rating Description: Exuberant and sensory-rich. The cascade of bubble imagery creates genuine momentum, carrying the reader through a fizzy journey from gym to reverie. The “poetic Möbius strip” concept is...
06 October 2025

The Cat that Never Came Back

★★★★
8/10
This poem showcases David Plahm’s gift for narrative voice and unexpected tenderness. The cat persona is fully realized—cocky, sensory-driven, unapologetically hedonistic—yet the poem earns its emotional payoff by revealing vulnerability...
05 October 2025

A Repository for a Stray Thought

★★★½
7/10
This poem embodies the playful, unguarded spirit that defines much of David Plahm’s work. Its charm lies in its refusal to take itself too seriously while still delivering genuine moments...
03 October 2025

Dreaming

★★★★½
9/10
“Dreaming” is one of David Plahm’s most lush and accomplished pieces—a sustained rhapsody that earns its length through relentless image-making and genuine emotional escalation. The poem’s strength lies in its...
02 October 2025

My Tears

★★★★
8/10
“My Tears” demonstrates the power of restraint. At just over 20 lines, it accomplishes what many longer poems cannot: it creates a complete emotional arc—from obscured vision to clarity, from...
01 October 2025

Cause & Effect: The Lady, the Sand, the Result

★★★★
8/10
This is an ambitious poem that takes real structural risks. The pairing of a simple love note with an extended autobiographical allegory creates productive tension—we understand the hug in the...
01 October 2025

My Lovely Lady

★★★
6/10
“My Lovely Lady” is intentionally slight—and therein lies both its charm and its limitation. The poem succeeds completely at what it sets out to do: express gratitude with warmth and...
29 September 2025

You Are/The One

★★★★
8/10
“You Are/The One” is an interesting formal experiment that mostly succeeds. The decision to present two versions of essentially the same poem creates a kind of call-and-response effect, allowing readers...
28 September 2025

Cuteness

★★★★
8/10
“Cuteness” is delightful in its specificity. Where many love poems content themselves with generalities (eyes, lips, hands), Plahm goes granular: dimpled knees, freckled toes, a quivering little finger, a perking...
28 September 2025

My Plant Named Lady

★★★½
7/10
“My Plant Named Lady” is an unusual entry in the collection—deliberately simple where other poems are lush, deliberately childlike where others are complex. This is both its strength and its...
28 September 2025

Art(ificial)

★★★½
7/10
“Art(ificial)” is one of Plahm’s most conceptually ambitious poems, built around a typographical conceit that allows “Art” to mean multiple things simultaneously. The wordplay is genuinely clever: the parenthetical formatting...
28 September 2025

Sacred Light

★★★★
8/10
“Sacred Light” is one of Plahm’s most accomplished love poems, achieving a sustained lyricism that justifies its title. The choice of candlelight as central image is inspired—it provides warmth without...
26 September 2025

Inside is Precious

★★★★
8/10
A quietly elegant piece that rewards close attention. Plahm demonstrates restraint here—the short, breath-like lines create a meditative rhythm that mirrors the act of appreciating someone fully. The progression from...
24 September 2025

The Loving Embrace

★★★★½
9/10
This poem showcases Plahm at his most tactile and emotionally exposed. The conceit of hands as the central image proves remarkably versatile—carrying weight both literal and metaphorical across the poem’s...
24 September 2025

Nectar Bytes & Thorns

★★★★
8/10
An ambitious piece that successfully marries the aphoristic with the personal. Plahm’s “nectar bytes” concept—wisdom fragments earned through experience’s thorns—provides a unifying framework that holds the poem’s varied modes together....
22 September 2025

Charlie (A Pantry Portrait)

★★★½
7/10
A playful, surprising little poem that demonstrates Plahm’s range beyond the romantic and metaphysical. The central conceit—eulogizing a can of tuna—is handled with genuine wit, and the poem earns its...
21 September 2025

I’ll Never Know

★★★★
8/10
A hypnotic meditation on romantic obsession that succeeds through sheer emotional honesty. The incantatory repetitions (Oh—Yes—No—Woe—My) could feel gimmicky but instead create genuine momentum, building toward the devastating final surrender....
20 September 2025

A Rush

★★★★
8/10
A compact, emotionally resonant piece that accomplishes more with less. The short, breath-like lines create a sense of urgency that mirrors the subject matter—the rush itself. Plahm wisely resists over-explaining;...
19 September 2025

The Unicorn’s Dance: Science and Soul

★★★★
8/10
An ambitious piece that succeeds by embracing its own contradictions. The prose sections risk breaking the spell of the poetry, but Plahm handles the transitions with surprising grace—the scientific framing...
18 September 2025

Painter as a Poet/Poet as a Painter

★★★
6/10
A deliberately raw, experimental piece that prioritizes spontaneity over polish. The opening question about Michelangelo and Shakespeare carries genuine intellectual weight, and the list of paradoxical emotional states (relaxing yet...
18 September 2025

Every—

★★★★
8/10
A masterclass in compression. This tiny poem punches well above its weight, using the familiar currency of time and money to make an unfamiliar point feel fresh. The repetition of...
18 September 2025

A Shirt

★★★★
8/10
A deceptively simple piece that accomplishes more in twelve lines than many poems do in fifty. The paired haiku structure creates a satisfying call-and-response effect: first the speaker examines their...
17 September 2025

Aurum

★★★★½
9/10
A sumptuous, unapologetically romantic poem that commits fully to its golden conceit and is richer for it. The blazon tradition—cataloguing the beloved’s beauties—is handled with fresh energy, and the medieval...
15 September 2025

Bertha’s Broadside

★★★★
8/10
A joyously irreverent piece that finds the sacred in the profane—or at least in the fluorescent-lit aisles of Walmart. Plahm’s gift for wordplay is on full display: the “berth/Bertha” pun,...
09 September 2025

Sunny Beaches and Calm Breezes (I Wish)

★★★★
8/10
A powerful illness narrative that earns its epic scope. The cascading natural disasters could feel excessive, but Plahm maintains control through the tight parallel structure and the gradual inward movement...
08 September 2025

Captured

★★★★
8/10
A masterfully structured poem that earns its emotional payoff through disciplined escalation. The opening stanzas accumulate dread with cinematic precision—wild animal, criminal, roadkill—while the refrain’s variations (“exposed,” “caught,” “stripped,” “drained”)...
06 September 2025

A Kiss Rose

★★★★
8/10
A charming, playful exploration of romantic awakening that succeeds through its central conceit: the “Kiss Rose” as both object and action, gift and genesis. The dense rhyme scheme (rose/nose/glows/flows/knows) creates...
06 September 2025

Are You?

★★★★
8/10
A tender, devotional lullaby that succeeds through its deliberate pacing and liturgical structure. The meta-framing—explicitly instructing the reader how to receive the poem—could feel gimmicky but instead creates genuine warmth,...
06 September 2025

Lady Slicker the Kicker

★★★★
8/10
An exuberant, percussive love poem that uses athletic imagery to capture devotion’s physical intensity. The triplet repetitions create genuine rhythmic propulsion—reading it aloud feels like a stadium chant building toward...
01 September 2025

When You Know (Something More)

★★★★
8/10
A tender, layered meditation on what makes someone truly beautiful. The poem’s structure—surface observation deepening into philosophical inquiry—mirrors the act of coming to know another person over time. The anaphoric...
30 August 2025

Foundation

★★★★
8/10
A winningly self-deprecating celebration of bodily acceptance disguised as comedy. The poem’s structure—absurdist list building toward philosophical pivot—demonstrates Plahm’s skill at hiding wisdom inside humor. The Fred Flintstone reference and...
29 August 2025

Do You Know?

★★★★
8/10
A tender check-in poem that earns its emotional weight through gentleness rather than grandeur. The anaphoric “You do know” opening establishes intimacy—the speaker isn’t declaring anything new but reminding the...
28 August 2025

George Knows

★★★★
8/10
A quietly powerful meditation that earns its emotional resonance through accumulation rather than grandeur. The mortuary opening is a masterful tonal gambit—introducing death’s shadow so George’s simple presence can dispel...
26 August 2025

Splitzoid: The Fracture of Society

★★★★
8/10
Plahm’s most structurally daring work—part manifesto, part love letter, part performance art directive. The poem risks everything by refusing containment: prose preamble bleeds into political polemic bleeds into dance anthem...
25 August 2025

Permission Slip

★★★★
8/10
A propulsive, infectious workout poem that reads like it was written mid-rep. Plahm’s greatest achievement here is rhythm—the staccato lines and italicized body-state inventories create genuine physical momentum that makes...
24 August 2025

Sometimes

★★★★
8/10
A hypnotic, meditative love poem that proves anaphora, when wielded with discipline, can create cumulative emotional power rivaling any narrative arc. Each “Sometimes,” stanza adds a new facet to the...
20 August 2025

Bestiary & Book of Nectar (The Breaking Up Card)

★★★★
7/10
Plahm’s darkest and most conceptually ambitious work—a genuine poetic grimoire that functions as both warning manual and spiritual taxonomy. The four-beast structure (Possum, Snake, Hyena, Wolf) is brilliantly organized, each...
17 August 2025

BB’s Blues

★★★★
8/10
A swaggering, infectious blues poem that demands to be read aloud—preferably with a band behind it. Plahm’s greatest innovation here is “Filswanky,” a nonsense word that somehow communicates perfectly: it’s...
15 August 2025

In My Mind’s Eye

★★★★
9/10
A masterclass in compression. Where many of Plahm’s poems achieve their power through accumulation—layer upon layer of imagery, repetition, and invented language—this one works by subtraction. Every word earns its...
14 August 2025

A Singular Moment

★★★★
9/10
This poem functions as the Rosetta Stone for understanding Plahm’s entire body of work. Everything that follows in the HoneyBeeBard canon—the Muse mythology, the devotion to a smile, the recurring...
12 August 2025

My Fantasy Blues

★★★★
6/10
A warm, bluesy meditation that achieves something rare in Plahm’s catalog: genuine humility before the beloved’s separate history. Where many of his poems celebrate the Muse through the lens of...
09 August 2025

Triple Dog Dare

★★★★
8/10
A disarming palate cleanser in the HoneyBeeBard catalog that proves Plahm’s range extends well beyond romantic devotion and metaphysical longing. The puppy voice is sustained with impressive consistency—never once does...
05 August 2025

An Observation

★★★
6/10
A sharp, honest aperçu that succeeds on the strength of its restraint. In five lines, Plahm manages to observe a social truth, confess vulnerability, and offer a quiet compliment—all without...
05 August 2025

The Lovely Whisper in the Dark

★★★★
8/10
An emotionally transparent poem that takes a considerable structural risk—building an elaborate cathedral of longing around a single day’s absence—and largely succeeds because of its unflinching self-awareness. The opening conceit...
03 August 2025

Of Roots and Power

★★★★
7/10
A departure that reveals Plahm’s range and convictions. Where most of his poems orbit the Muse, this one orbits community—and discovers that the two are connected. The poem’s greatest strength...
02 August 2025

Is It My Jagged Charm?

★★★★
10/10
One of the most likable poems in the entire HoneyBeeBard catalog, and its 41 likes suggest the audience agrees. The poem’s greatest achievement is tonal: it sustains a conversational, self-effacing...
23 July 2025

The Moonlit Walk

★★★★
8/10
A lush, unapologetically romantic poem that earns its 43 likes through sheer atmospheric commitment. The recurring refrain is the poem’s backbone, and Plahm handles it with skill—each return of “The...
19 July 2025

Just a Small Share

★★★★
10/10
An emotionally layered poem that rewards patient reading, moving through several distinct registers—physical, emotional, metaphysical—before arriving at its symbolic conclusion. The opening question-and-answer structure is effective, with each repetition of...
18 July 2025

Breath, Blood, and Coffee

★★★
7/10
The most polarizing poem in Plahm’s catalog—a piece that will either feel bracingly honest or undisciplined depending on the reader’s tolerance for raw, unedited political verse. The 35 likes suggest...
17 July 2025

The Rockin’ Chair Gospel

★★★★★
9/10
A remarkable poem that earns its “gospel” title by finding the sacred inside the utterly ordinary—rocking chairs, Christmas socks, porch lights, chameleons in boots. The 20 likes may underrepresent this...
16 July 2025

Laugh Out Loud!

★★★★
8/10
A generous, warm-hearted poem that manages the difficult trick of being funny and profound simultaneously—though it earns its profundity precisely by not reaching for it. The 23 likes feel right...
14 July 2025

The Beauty You Carry

★★★★
8/10
A quietly commanding poem that earns its 65 likes—the highest engagement in recent memory—through emotional clarity and structural restraint. Where many of Plahm’s longer works achieve their power through accumulation...
14 July 2025

Musings to My Muse

★★★★
8/10
A poem that achieves maximum impact through minimum means—fewer than thirty lines that contain the entire emotional architecture of the HoneyBeeBard project. The anaphoric opening is deceptively simple; what appears...
14 July 2025

Epilogue

★★★
7/10
A poem that asks to be judged not in isolation but as the final movement of a three-part sequence—and in that context, it succeeds as a satisfying closing gesture. The...
14 July 2025

The Mythology of a Poet

★★★★
6/10
The most structurally daring poem in the HoneyBeeBard catalog, and one that rewards multiple readings as its layers reveal themselves. The polyphonic conceit—constructing the poet’s mythology through competing voices—is genuinely...
14 July 2025

Prologue

★★★
7/10
A conceptually sophisticated opening that functions more effectively as frame than as standalone poem—which is, to be fair, exactly what it intends. The parenthetical instruction about removing beginnings and endings...
14 July 2025

Hush

★★★★
8/10
A poem that operates by accumulation and surprise, rewarding readers who surrender to its associative drift and challenging those who require linear architecture. The opening admission of a lost thought...
11 July 2025

Not Always

★★★★
8/10
A deceptively lightweight poem that reveals surprising depth on rereading. The opening gambit—subverting the most overused couplet in English poetry—is a smart structural choice because it immediately establishes the poem’s...
10 July 2025

I’m Just A Dude

★★★★
8/10
The most popular poem in the HoneyBeeBard catalog by engagement metrics, and its appeal is immediately clear: this is a poem that works as both literature and product, both confession...
10 July 2025

Funky Fusion Twice Baked

★★★★
8/10
A poem that demands to be heard rather than read—and that’s not a criticism but a description of its medium. The 52 likes and its status as the lead track...
10 July 2025

Stars in My Eyes

★★★★
8/10
A sweeping, earnest love poem that gains considerable power from its musical context—as Track 02 on the EP, it would benefit from Elena Welch’s vocal delivery in ways the page...
10 July 2025

The Authenticity of Beauty

★★★★
6/10
One of the most immediately charming poems in the HoneyBeeBard catalog, and its 44 likes reflect an audience that recognizes itself in its wit and warmth. The question-and-answer structure is...
09 July 2025

The Art of Not Saying the Word

★★★★
8/10
The most accomplished song lyric in the HoneyBeeBard catalog, and the one that most successfully integrates Plahm’s recurring “unsaid word” motif with musical form. As Track 05 on the EP—the...
09 July 2025

Think in Blue

★★★★
7/10
The most cohesive and conceptually tight song lyric on the EP, and the one that most fully earns the album’s “Blue” title. Where “Funky Fusion” celebrates jazz and “Stars in...
09 July 2025

Mended Valentine

★★★★
7/10
A quietly effective prose poem that succeeds by refusing to perform. Where much of the HoneyBeeBard catalog thrives on structural invention—cascading line breaks, anaphoric build-ups, tonal shifts from comic to...
09 July 2025

Gee-Wizzy’s G-Code Dance

★★★★
8/10
A maximalist, risk-taking poem that is by turns brilliant and bewildering—and knows it. The central conceit of mapping CNC G-codes onto human dance and intimacy is genuinely original, the kind...
08 July 2025

That Treasure is You

★★★★
8/10
A quietly essential piece that says plainly what dozens of longer, more elaborate poems in the catalog say through metaphor—and there is real courage in that plainness. Where “Hush” needs...
07 July 2025

The Together Dance (The Backside of You)

★★★★
8/10
A deceptively simple poem that does more structural and emotional work than its breezy tone suggests. The front-side/back-side conceit is the kind of idea that sounds like it shouldn’t sustain...
06 July 2025

Death of a Muse

★★★★★
9/10
A tour de force that tackles the most dangerous question a muse-dependent poet can ask—what if I lost her?—and transforms existential dread into comedy, mythology, gothic romance, and collaborative haiku,...
04 July 2025

Ripples of Truth

★★★★
8/10
An ambitious poem that attempts to bridge marine biology, water mysticism, romantic devotion, and Independence Day patriotism through a single governing metaphor—and largely succeeds because Plahm commits fully to the...
03 July 2025

HOW (Hell on Wheels)

★★★★
8/10
The rawest and most confrontational poem in the HoneyBeeBard catalog, and one that earns its profanity by making every expletive do structural work. The proliferating acronym conceit is genuinely inventive—by...
02 July 2025

What Are You Worth?

★★★★
8/10
One of the most broadly accessible and emotionally generous poems in the HoneyBeeBard catalog, and its 33 likes—among the highest engagement numbers recorded—confirm that the catechism structure and direct emotional...
02 July 2025

It’s Not the Light

★★★★
9/10
A poem that earns its 37 likes—among the highest in the entire catalog—by doing the thing most love poems are afraid to do: completely surrender. The bilingual structure is not...
02 July 2025

Symptoms of You

★★★★
9/10
One of the most tightly constructed and broadly appealing poems in the entire HoneyBeeBard catalog, and its 35 likes confirm what the reading experience suggests: this is a poem that...
02 July 2025

Endear You (To Me)

★★★★
8/10
A small poem that does exactly one thing and does it perfectly: it finds the gap between what we’re supposed to call the people we love and what we actually...
02 July 2025

A Valentine Recipe

★★★★
8/10
A beautifully efficient prose valentine that achieves in four paragraphs what many love poems need four pages to say, and does so without sacrificing specificity or warmth. The recipe metaphor...
24 June 2025

From Turbulence to a Dream—Take Two

★★★★
8/10
A poem that achieves remarkable emotional distance in a compact space—from maelstrom to glass seas, from panic to buttercream, from turbulence to dream—and does so with imagery that is both...
23 June 2025

My Auction, My trigger?

★★★
7/10
A poem that operates almost entirely on compression and implication, and whose effectiveness depends heavily on its placement within the catalog rather than its standalone merit. The descending list of...
19 June 2025

From Turbulence to a Dream—Take One

★★★★
8/10
A raw, unvarnished first draft that possesses qualities its polished revision deliberately smoothed away—and is arguably stronger for their presence. Where “Take Two” adds humor (the Eternal Chicken Soup), brand...
17 June 2025

There Better Be

★★★★
8/10
A poem that earns its philosophical ambitions by grounding them in craft, emotion, and a single explosive profanity that does more structural work than entire stanzas of lesser poems. The...
13 June 2025

Trauma to Purpose

★★★★
8/10
One of the most physically intense poems in the HoneyBeeBard catalog, and one that succeeds precisely because it refuses the vocabulary of conventional love poetry and replaces it with the...
12 June 2025

Neuro Divergence

★★★★
8/10
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...
10 June 2025

The Final Dive

★★★★
8/10
The most tonally restrained poem in the HoneyBeeBard catalog, and one that achieves its emotional impact through subtraction rather than accumulation—a rare move for a poet whose signature is exuberant...
10 June 2025

Light That Torch

★★★★
9/10
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...
07 June 2025

How Much?

★★★
7/10
A poem that achieves maximum impact-per-word ratio and functions beautifully as a shareable fragment—the kind of piece readers screenshot and text to someone they love. The line breaks are doing...
07 June 2025

The Intimacy of Language

★★★★
8/10
One of the most formally controlled poems in the catalog, and one of the few that achieves its effect through compression rather than accumulation. The anaphoric first stanza—each line beginning...
07 June 2025

Pursuit to Truth

★★★
7/10
A wisp of a poem that punches above its weight through strategic compression and a single devastating ellipsis. The ninety-to-eighteen seesaw in the opening is effective shorthand for the catalog’s...
07 June 2025

First Sight

★★★★
9/10
A poem that earns its place among the essential pieces in the HoneyBeeBard catalog by doing what the best love poems do: making the familiar feel impossible, the repeated feel...
05 June 2025

A Trinity of Authenticity, Care and Transformation

★★★★
8/10
An ambitious, sprawling suite that functions as both ars poetica and love letter, with a pastoral centerpiece that ranks among the most sensorily vivid passages in the entire catalog. The...
05 June 2025

A Drunken Thanks

★★★
7/10
A perfectly executed comic sketch that knows exactly what it is and doesn’t try to be anything more. The phonetic misspellings are precise rather than sloppy—each one performs a specific...
03 June 2025

A Love Letter From The Apocalypse

★★★★
8/10
A deceptively sophisticated poem wearing a clown suit. Beneath the gross-out humor operates one of the catalog’s most emotionally complex family portraits, and the fact that it never once drops...
03 June 2025

I’ve Been Hexed! I’ve Been Blessed!

★★★★
8/10
A cleverly constructed poem that achieves more structural coherence than its light, incantatory surface suggests. The hex/six/spell triple-meaning is the poem’s engine, and Plahm exploits it fully without over-explaining—the etymological...
01 June 2025

My Garden Fable

★★★★
8/10
A light poem that accomplishes something surprisingly difficult: it operates as genuine fable while never losing its comic voice, and the philosophical frame earns its weight by the final line....
01 June 2025

Illumination (A Reflection)

★★★★
7/10
A poem that succeeds through the accumulation of quiet, observed details rather than through any single pyrotechnic moment. The anti-blazon strategy—defining beauty through behavior rather than physical description—is both philosophically...
30 May 2025

Tunnel Vision (In Superposition)

★★★★
8/10
A poem that achieves maximum compression: twelve lines, zero waste. The title carries genuine intellectual weight, marrying an idiomatic cliché to a physics concept in a way that makes both...
25 May 2025

Grill Me Tender: A Culinary Cataclysm

★★★★
8/10
The catalog’s most ambitious comic-erotic poem, and one of its most successful sustained performances. The three-act structure—kitchen catastrophe, grill apotheosis, erotic dessert—gives the poem genuine narrative architecture, and the transition...
24 May 2025

The Feelies

★★★
7/10
A charming, unpretentious song-lyric that succeeds entirely on voice, rhythm, and the warmth of its invented vocabulary. “The feelies” as a coinage is genuinely good—it sounds natural, fills a real...
24 May 2025

Life’s Maelstrom

★★★
7/10
A clean, well-executed micro-poem that achieves genuine compression and lets a single metaphor do sustained work. The ocean-as-life, moon-as-Muse conceit is mapped with care: “senseless” carries a productive double meaning,...
23 May 2025

Evolution – from Secret to Sacred

★★★★
8/10
A structurally ambitious two-act poem that uses a single word—”Guilty”—as both percussion instrument and emotional thesis, building through repetition toward a confession that earns its simplicity. Act I’s stacking technique...
22 May 2025

Economy of Life

★★★★
8/10
A structurally elegant poem that earns its wisdom through careful construction rather than mere declaration. The symmetrical opening—hate as mist versus love as roots—is both memorable and philosophically sound, giving...
26 January 2025

Follow You!

★★★
7/10
A founding poem that functions exactly as intended: as a clear, unguarded declaration of devotion that establishes the emotional bedrock of the entire catalog. The anaphoric litany (“Your beauty lights…...
26 January 2025

Sleep Walking

★★★★
8/10
A masterclass in comic timing disguised as a nine-line poem. The setup-punchline structure is flawless: the first stanza’s escalating existential vocabulary (“waking dream,” “maze,” “silent woe”) plays completely straight, building...
26 January 2025

Your Ear

★★★★
8/10
The most formally daring piece in the founding batch, operating in prose rather than verse and using the vocabulary of design and biology rather than romance. The choice of the...
26 January 2025

Christmas

★★★
7/10
The most commercially instinctive piece in the founding batch, establishing the greeting-card mode that becomes a distinct format within the catalog. The negation sequence (“Not religious, not political, not sectarian,...
26 January 2025

Tomorrow

★★★★
8/10
The catalog’s origin point and its most compressed philosophical statement: five lines mapping an entire temporal ontology where the past is a vague thought, the present is guidance, and the...
Tips
The "Taste of Honey" page features ratings of David's featured poems for this current month. To locate ratings for all David's poems visit the Poetry Blog, select a poem and click on the "Rating" tab. It's a work in progress so ratings for all poems may not be in place yet.