Count the W's in these five lines and you'll find only one, the very letter the poem announces as stolen. Everything else, from "books" and "music" to "thief" and "son," gets by without it. Apart from the title, the capital W in the fourth line is the only one. Dave Bonta's "W-less" is almost a lipogram, a text written with one letter missing, and the twist is that the missing letter is also its subject. The poem enacts the loss it describes.
On the surface, the story runs in two moves. The first two lines are pure contentment: "My books fit my mind, / a music beyond imagination." The verb "fit" suggests a glove, or a key in a lock, as if the speaker's reading and his thinking were made for each other. Books become "music," and a music "beyond imagination" is a pleasing paradox, since it is something the speaker has and yet cannot picture. Then comes the hinge word "But." A thief enters and takes "a letter." The pun is quietly funny: we expect a letter to be a piece of mail, but this one is a character of the alphabet, and it is stolen "to send to his son." The thief's motive is oddly tender. He takes a single W, a small and strange present, and sends it to his child. The crime shrinks into something almost like a gift.
That shift of tone is where the poem's central idea sits. Language is both a private possession and a common inheritance. The speaker owns his books and his inner music, but the alphabet belongs to everyone, so it can be borrowed, stolen or handed down. The poem leaves open whether the speaker is truly harmed. His mind is as full as before, yet the W is a letter that would have given him "words," "write," "world" and "wonder." The speaker also says "my" twice and never "we," which the missing letter makes impossible. That may be coincidence, but it is a fair thing to notice: without W, the poem can only speak from a solitary "I."
The construction is spare, and it rewards a slow reading. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only free verse in short lines. The lengths still matter. Line 1 ("My books fit my mind") and line 5 ("to send to his son") each have five syllables. Line 2, "a music beyond imagination," sprawls to ten, and its long, flowing shape seems to act out the word "beyond." The fourth line looks tiny on the page, but when you read it aloud the letter becomes "double-u," and "the last double-u" is also five syllables. The stolen letter weighs more in sound than it does in print.
Sound does a good deal of the work as well. The first two lines hum with m's ("My," "mind," "music," "my"), so the music is literally audible. The thief's lines turn to softer, slipperier consonants: "stole," "last," "letter," "send," "son." The sibilance gives the theft a hushed, sneaking quality. Two dashes also shape the pacing. The first, after "letter," holds the reveal back for a beat. The second, after "W," cuts the line off short, as though the letter had been snatched out of the sentence. The final line then lands in plain one-syllable words, flat and ordinary, like a fact reported after the event.
The most inventive detail is the phrase "the last W." Since W is not the final letter of the alphabet, "last" most plausibly means the final one remaining. That fits the poem's own economy, because after line 4 no W follows. The poem has spent its supply, and the reader watches it run out. The letter is both stolen and displayed, gone and on the page at once.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in five lines. It works as a miniature fable about scarcity and inheritance, and it makes the reader do the counting and the detective work. It is also affectionate, because the thief can be read, though this is an inference rather than something stated, as a father giving his son a small piece of language to own. The poem asks us to think about what we would miss if a single letter disappeared, and its answer is both witty and warm.