This is Plahm’s most sustained confrontation with death, and arguably his most emotionally exposed poem in the entire catalog. The title frames dying as a kind of homespun scripture—a “gospel” preached not from a pulpit but from a rocking chair on a porch at sunset. The opening stage direction (“Read this at home / In the quiet time / In the early dawn”) is an extraordinary gesture: the poet is literally directing how the poem should be received, asking for the same intimacy the poem itself enacts. The speaker’s voice is fractured by age—”I’m a silly salad / Or a chickn’ / On the grill / I don’t know / What the eF’n I’m talkin’ bout”—but this confusion is the point. The mind wanders, loses its thread, stumbles into profanity, then suddenly snaps into devastating clarity: “But / If / I / Think / Of You? / Everything becomes clear.” That single-word-per-line staircase is the poem’s structural masterpiece, the syntax itself enacting the slow, deliberate effort of an aging mind reaching for coherence. The chameleons living in abandoned boots is an image of startling originality—the natural world reclaiming the speaker’s belongings even before death, lizards rocking in Christmas socks while the speaker rocks in his chair. The tribute to Sodie and Jaimie grounds the poem in specific, named love—this is not abstract mortality but the lived experience of losing and remembering real people. The closing instruction—”Turn off / the porch light”—is perfect in its mundane finality. No grand metaphysical pronouncement, no heavenly gates: just a practical request that doubles as the most tender metaphor for death imaginable. The light was left on for someone. Now it can go off. They’re home.

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 poem’s achievement; it’s the kind of piece that rewards rereading and deepens with age, which is fitting for a poem about aging itself. The fractured syntax is the poem’s greatest technical accomplishment—Plahm doesn’t just write about a deteriorating mind, he enacts it. The speaker loses his thread, curses, compares himself to grilled chicken, then pivots with devastating precision to moments of crystalline emotional truth. The single-word staircase lines (“But / If / I / Think / Of You?”) slow the reader to the speaker’s pace, forcing a shared experience of effortful cognition that is both formally inventive and deeply moving. The chameleon conceit is unlike anything else in Plahm’s work—whimsical and surreal, yet grounded in the domestic reality of boots left outside so long that nature colonizes them. It’s a metaphor for death that refuses to be solemn: even mortality has lizards wearing Christmas socks. The tribute to Sodie and Jaimie provides the poem’s emotional specificity, insisting that love is not an abstraction but a named person whose laugh is “a personal remembrance.” The closing is among the finest endings in the entire HoneyBeeBard catalog. “Turn off / the porch light” accomplishes what lesser poets would need an entire stanza to achieve: it says goodbye, it says thank you, it says the waiting is over, and it says it all through a gesture so small and domestic that it breaks your heart. Minor note: the poem’s length and associative drift may lose some readers in the middle passages, but the closing pulls everything together with such authority that the wandering feels retrospectively necessary—the mind had to roam before it could arrive at peace. Essential Plahm.