Who's to say they're not rummaging around inside her,

stretching her private parts while she's on the phone to me

and they're at home watching play-backs of Countdown

on VHS? Say they ignored it 40 years ago, never owned up?

(Listen to the girl who said get your hands off my backside

live on Radio 1. Listen to her parents’ nervous laughter,

the patting of laps. It's in the archive.)

But a newspaper cutting, in a file in a locked drawer

in the woman's parents’ house, of the woman rescued

from throwing herself from the twelfth floor proves it.

She's making it up; her imagination's gone riot.

The moon is gallivanting around, performing audacities

like looking at her and looking at them and not saying

with whom the guilt lies. He keeps her on a line like a fish

against a rip current and with every pull the split widens

and in they climb, peeling back her hair, scalp, skull,

the skin of her brain, settling down, listening in.

She's not the woman she would've been, they say. I know

I say. You don't know her, they say. I know, I say.

But I do know this: the half-life of a child strung

to the ceiling by her voice box, body dumb on the floor,

someone aiming something like a gun at her, telling her

it's ok, telling her she's crazy

to imagine such a thing.