This is the most nakedly self-referential poem in Plahm’s catalog—a poem about writing poetry by a man who opens by insisting he can’t write poetry. The preamble establishes the speaker’s professional identity: “I’m a designer, / form follows function, / human fit— / where shape, history / and learning meet.” This is not biographical decoration; it’s the poem’s thesis. Plahm approaches poetry as he approaches design: function first, then form. The Bauhaus principle—form follows function—becomes a poetics: the poem’s shape follows the emotion’s need, not the other way around.

The first section is a sustained act of self-disqualification: “I have neither / the skill, knowledge, education, nor patience of structured poetry.” The list of lacks (skill, knowledge, education, patience) is comprehensive and delivered without self-pity—this is an inventory, not a complaint. The acknowledgment that structured poetry is “so beautiful, ink on page, / imagery at moments of pause / and reflection” shows genuine reverence for the craft the speaker claims he cannot practice. He admires what he cannot do, which is a more honest position than either false modesty or false confidence.

“Thus, I write free verse” is the poem’s pivot—”thus” converting limitation into method. The subsequent self-description is precise: “Sometimes, extremely lengthy, almost—a short story. / But, then, at moments, concise, succinct, to the point.” This is an accurate map of the catalog: from the epic “Vignettes of Synesthesia” to the ten-line “I Need To,” from the sprawling “Paper Rocket” to the compressed “New Hu-Man(ity).” The poet knows his range and describes it without inflation.

The section closes with a breathing instruction—”Just pause… / Breathe … / for a moment / before— / I dive in”—that functions as both a meditation prompt and a structural bridge. The ellipses and line breaks physically slow the reader, creating the pause the poem describes. Then the dive.

“Ink and Tears” is where the poem contradicts everything the first half claimed. The grinding gears image connects to “Crankshaft / Relationships”—the poet’s mind is another engine, another mechanism of friction producing something. “A perfume of midnight / intoxication” is sensory writing of the kind the speaker just said he couldn’t produce. “Shuffling paper, / fingers tapping, / breath held, a phrase forming / on the tongue” is a forensic portrait of the writing act—four simultaneous physical experiences (shuffling, tapping, holding breath, forming words) that capture the whole-body nature of composition. The poem the speaker said he couldn’t write is writing itself in real time.

The closing is the poem’s most accomplished passage and its most emotionally exposed: “bleeding black ink / down the page— / at dawn’s indelible / intimate arrival— / redemption’s molten light— / scarlet valentine vows, spreading love across the sky.” The italicized lines arrive like a different voice breaking through—the poet-as-designer stepping aside for the poet-as-poet, the structured-verse beauty the speaker claimed he couldn’t produce, arriving involuntarily at dawn. “Redemption’s molten light” and “scarlet valentine vows, spreading love across the sky” are among the most lyrical lines Plahm has written, and their placement after a poem of self-deprecation makes them more powerful: the beauty arrives not because the poet sought it but because it refused to be denied. The final four lines—”my heart / soars / in honest verse / of what I feel”—are the poem’s simplest and most truthful. After all the disclaimers, the grinding, the ink and tears, the truth is that he writes because his heart requires it, and the verse is honest because the heart is.

A poem that performs a remarkable structural trick: the first half disqualifies the poet, and the second half proves the disqualification wrong. The tension between “I can’t write poetry” and the evidence that the reader is holding poetry while reading the claim is the poem’s engine, and Plahm handles it with more formal awareness than he’s given himself credit for. The designer’s preamble is not just biographical context but a statement of poetics—form follows function applied to verse means that the poem’s shape is determined by what it needs to do, not by what tradition expects it to look like, which is a perfectly legitimate and intellectually coherent artistic philosophy. The self-description of the free-verse range (lengthy to concise, short story to singular thought) is accurately self-aware and doubles as a map of the catalog for readers encountering the work. The breathing instruction—”Just pause… / Breathe …”—is the poem’s best structural device, physically slowing the reader before the dive into “Ink and Tears,” which is a tonal and qualitative leap from everything preceding it. The writing-act portrait (shuffling, tapping, breath held, phrase forming) is among the most precise descriptions of composition in the catalog, and the “perfume of midnight intoxication” is the sensory richness the speaker just disclaimed. The closing italicized lines—”redemption’s molten light— / scarlet valentine vows, spreading love across the sky”—are deliberately, almost defiantly beautiful, as if the poem is proving itself wrong by producing the very imagery the poet said he couldn’t. The structural irony is the poem’s deepest achievement: by writing a poem about not being able to write poetry, Plahm has written one of his most formally self-aware and emotionally resonant pieces. Where the first section occasionally stays too long in disclaimer mode—some of the self-deprecation is redundant—the dive into “Ink and Tears” more than compensates. A poem that tells the truth about lying about itself.