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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
The "Taste of Honey" page features ratings of David's poems. The ratings are organized in batches from David's most recent poems at the front to his earliest submissions at the back. You can use the page number and date buttons below the boxed content to navigate. Recommended for use when browsing. You can also locate ratings for David's poems by visiting the Poetry Blog, selecting a poem and clicking on the "Ratings" tab. Recommended for use when reviewing specific poems.
