—from the Canki Sutta

I would have myself say it gill-o-tin—
as if expelled with bubbles from the breathing
apparatus of a hardy American fish,
throat full of water—but my bougie bent
demands it be chopped short in the middle
of my strained mouth, shorn of its superfluous
l-sound, ghee-o-teen, pronounced to please
a status-seeking suburban middle class,
the way public execution was made more
endurable by the pleas of a sensitive
and upwardly mobile doctor,
born to Madame Guillotin,
her labor vexed by the overheard
screams of a poor Parisian
tortured on the breaking wheel,
so raised her son to embrace
a morbid cause. What a reformer
he must have seemed,
this man of science and mercy
who patiently flayed the practice
of breaking bodies on a wheel—
so unappealing as metaphor,
not to mention managerially unsound,
viewed against the simplicity
of swiftly severing heads. His success
was absolute, chaining his proud
patronymic to the triumph of a better
death machine, and though he lobbied
to change its name, distance himself
from that gruesome legacy,
the wheel rolls on, monsieur docteur,
and we’re nothing beneath the butchering
birth of a word.