It's 1976 and I'm writing poems like this. Clearly suicidal ideation. I might have been less so than previously, but there is pain in much of poetry.

The type of poem this was modelled on is called a villanelle, although when writing it, I didn't quite understand the form, so I'll have to go back and have another go at writing a proper one.

In a proper villanelle, all bar the last verse has 3 lines (a tercet). The final verse has 4, a quatrain. So far so good. But after that I deviated.

The first verse rhymes the first line with the third, so A1-B-A2. The words A1 and A2 then control the rest of the verses, alternating as the rhyme of each third line, so you get a-b-A1, then a-b-A2, etc. There must be an equal number of verses containing A1 and A2. The final verse is made of 4 lines: a-b-A1-A2. Quite tricky, because every line rhymes with either a or b.

In Death By Water, the repetition of the last word of the first and third lines occurs, but they do not rhyme. Nor do any of the other lines. I didn't pay enough attention to the form, so at best it is villanelle-like. There are repeated words scattered through the poem (water, answer, question.) They are scattered, rippled, disturbing.