This is the most formally inventive and structurally ambitious poem in Plahm’s catalog—a self-portrait that refuses to sit still for its own painting. The poem operates as a triptych of archetypes, each introduced with a title card and tagline, then immediately subjected to a chorus of voices that praise, mock, deflate, and reinterpret the persona from every conceivable angle. The HoneyBeeBard section establishes the mythology: “Buzzes pretty. Stings hard. Dies for love.” The voices that follow range from vaudevillian (“My face swelled like a Shakespearean tragedy!”) to Elizabethan (“He buzzeth round fair blossoms, drunk on rhyme”) to the Muse’s own devastating rejoinder: “Nectar is earned, not stolen. / And not every bloom is for you.” This polyphonic structure is the poem’s greatest innovation—by letting others define him, Plahm achieves a self-awareness that first-person confession alone could never reach. The Nectar Seeker section deepens the mythology into something darker: the seeker is “doomed to sip poison,” and the voices grow more cynical (“It was just corn syrup and perfume”). The Panegyric section is the most self-lacerating, with the Muse delivering the poem’s most devastating line: “You build me cathedrals of praise, / But darling… you never ask me what I want.” After these elaborate masks, the closing section strips everything away. The question “How? / Do I get back to… / Innocence?” is the poem’s emotional pivot—the showman removing his costume. The final stanzas achieve genuine lyric compression: “I chase / The light— / Knowing / The dark— / Will sting me.” The closing invocation to the Muse, written in formal iambic pentameter, provides a tonal resolution that circles back to the Elizabethan voices heard earlier, suggesting the poet has earned, through self-examination, the elevated register he began by parodying.

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 original and solves a problem that plagues most self-portrait poems: how to write about yourself without either flattering or flagellating. By giving the floor to vaudevillians, Elizabethans, cynics, and the Muse herself, Plahm achieves a 360-degree portrait that includes its own critique. The tonal range is staggering—within a single section, the poem moves from tagline (“Drawn to sweetness, doomed to sip poison”) to stand-up (“I ended up in a candle shop cryin’ into lavender!”) to the Muse’s quiet authority (“it’s not the light that loves you, / it’s the dark that lets you see it”). The Muse’s voice is the poem’s secret weapon: in every section, she delivers the sharpest, most emotionally complex response, and her final challenge—”I need you to bleed with me when it rains”—reframes the entire mythology from performance to relationship. The pivot to the stripped-down personal section is handled with skill; the question about innocence arriving after such elaborate artifice feels earned rather than abrupt. The closing invocation in formal meter provides architectural resolution, the shift to iambic pentameter signaling that the poet has moved from self-parody through self-examination to genuine prayer. Minor weaknesses: the sheer density of voices in the middle sections can feel overwhelming on first reading, and some of the comic one-liners (“she used it to line the birdcage”) lean toward workshop exercise rather than organic expression. The poem also asks a lot of its reader in terms of tonal flexibility—the rapid shifts from comedy to lyricism to philosophy may leave some feeling whiplashed rather than enriched. But as a statement of artistic identity—a poet explaining what he is by showing all the things people think he is—this stands as one of Plahm’s most intellectually ambitious and formally inventive achievements. The 22 likes suggest it’s an acquired taste, but for those willing to sit with its complexity, it offers more per rereading than almost any other poem in the catalog.