No, lady, the foregoing poem is neither

a riddle nor a rebus.  Nothing to be guessed.

When it says, “It has no name,” it means just that.

No, not “grace,” “vision,” “caritas,”

or some exuberant, all-embracing, new,

exhilarating virtue that God and I

have just concocted.

Look, read the thing again, taking it literally.

You are handicapped by thinking of me as having

some eldritch pact with words.  Whereas—

groping drop-out from night school,

lifelong at odds with them for their chicanery and despotism—

I consort with words only from sheer loneliness,

as a lifer in solitary might welcome

the companionship of a spider or a cockroach.

          Listen…

No, that is asking too much…