The Manipulator’s Puzzle

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.