He knew the importance of words
and treated life like a crossword;
taking hints and context to places
that he never knew were possible,
solving them faster than his mind could keep,
he was full of it,
and every letter got him closer
to his dreams of entitlement.

Oh you've solved it, all right,
but his genius was limited,
nothing but words on a page;
The puzzles? He'd just skimmed it,
and each box became his defeat
for his words would no longer speak.

He could only solve the same book;
shoulders up, blamed his luck
on his limited palette,
maybe he'd done better if he invested
in a thing like vocabulary.

A forgotten mission, a new edition,
blew around in his mind,
but somehow he never could manage
to find the time
to understand these riddles' complexity,
and so to this challenge, *he'd flee.