Etymology

Those were the days when I didn’t want to kill myself but I
did take the word suicide out of my pocket now and then,
its syllables like the undulations of black and orange
furred caterpillars, revolting and adorable. Sometimes the
word would grow tender rows of quills
that I could stroke and pluck into a private music. Even
the abysmal eyes of horses watching me as I walked through their country of flies could not silence it. I was the man
in his dead mother’s summer dress preening over one shoulder in a hand mirror, admiring how his dark hair foamed at the décolletage, waiting for the annihilating footstep on the stair.