Here’s the ACF content for “That Treasure is You”:

SUMMARY
Date
07-08-25
Title
That Treasure is You
Topic
A prose meditation on the experience of creative inspiration—the muse’s arrival as a state of grace that lifts the speaker from the mundane into clarity, vision, and gratitude—culminating in the revelation that the muse and the beloved are one.
Summary
Written entirely in prose, “That Treasure is You” functions as a personal essay on the phenomenology of inspiration, and it may be the most direct statement in the entire HoneyBeeBard catalog of what the Muse actually means to this poet. The piece moves through three paragraphs that correspond to three stages of the experience: the arrival (sudden, unbidden, at any time of day), the transformation (extraction from daily living, elevation of spirit, revelation of truth), and the recognition (the muse is not an abstraction but a person—”you”). The opening paragraph’s honesty is disarming: the speaker admits that what pours out may not be “truly good,” a rare moment of self-doubt in a catalog that generally celebrates creative abundance. This vulnerability makes the subsequent claim of feeling “immensely satisfied, lucky and fulfilled” more credible—it’s not boasting but testimony. The second paragraph describes creative inspiration with almost clinical precision: “a complete personal extraction from the mundane of daily living” reads like a phenomenological report, not a poem, and that’s intentional. By describing the mystical in plain language, Plahm avoids the trap of making inspiration sound precious or inaccessible. Instead, it sounds like something that happens to a real person between breakfast and lunch. The closing paragraph’s three-sentence descent—from abstract (“such a treasure is my muse”) to personal (“I value that beyond my life”) to direct address (“That treasure is you”)—is a structural miniature of the entire HoneyBeeBard project: everything begins in concept and ends in a person. The subtitle “Magical Moment” and the 20 likes confirm this piece resonates as an origin statement. Read alongside “A Singular Moment,” “Musings to My Muse,” and “Hush,” it forms part of a constellation of poems that map the specific geography of how one person became everything.

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 multiple movements and Deep Purple quotations to circle the same truth, and “Gee-Wizzy’s G-Code Dance” needs two hundred lines and a robot named Whizzy, “That Treasure is You” simply sits down and tells you what happens when the muse arrives, what it feels like, and who the muse is. Three paragraphs, no line breaks, no structural tricks, no evasion. The result is one of the most accessible entry points into the HoneyBeeBard world: a reader encountering this poem first would immediately understand the emotional engine that drives the entire project. The admission that the creative output may not be “truly good” is the piece’s most important sentence—it separates Plahm from poets who mystify their own process and places him among those who recognize that inspiration is a gift regardless of whether the resulting work is perfect. The second paragraph’s description of time stopping—”a few minutes, maybe a couple hours”—is a lovely detail that grounds the experience in lived reality rather than Romantic abstraction. The closing pivot from “my muse” to “you” is earned by everything that precedes it, and the title’s promise is fulfilled without fanfare. At 20 likes, the engagement is strong for a prose piece this short and unadorned. The limitation is the limitation of all direct statement: without metaphor, compression, or formal structure, the piece offers its truth on first reading and doesn’t change on the second. But as a declaration of artistic purpose and personal devotion, it is irreducible—you cannot say what this poem says in fewer or better words, and that is its own kind of perfection.