The Spell

No doubt women’s names did act on me:
It was a phenomenon, a registering event,
Mary, Maria, Maryanne, up and down the stave,
Their illicit letters ran out to finishing sharps—
This, all my life, was normal;
Men’s names, the Marks, the Toms,
The Jonathans, they didn’t even decibel,
Like, if a mouth could moan them
Mine wasn’t calibrated; it was out of range;
It was subject vs. object: I guess these guys
Made girls do it in a corner of my hard drive,
End of, ne plus ultra — but it wasn’t, there was more;
He found me so gently where I was,
And manning lone that no-man’s land,
What exquisite traps he laid out
By being himself, swapping letters from 
Won’t until it was Will, spelling no y-e-s,
He taught me a language I didn’t want
To ever learn and waited for me to speak it;
I think he was confident; I think he knew;
He worked on me like a sentence
He just had to finish.