That day when none of us could speak

That day when none of us could speak

Do they remember? Do you remember? Do I remember?

I say nothing, even if I see the day.

You spoke first, putting a fist and a cork and a toaster for good measure inside my throat.

You were the last of us who dared say a word.

Watching your only child suffocate, and to add

Insult to injury

Measure the shocks of your volts climbing up and out of her chest

Taking their rest upon the sofa where she should have lain

Holding you in comfort, and instead she ran

You saw something, but you couldn't sing after her

Muted, suddenly, by her pain

And now her song has stopped, cut, suffocated and strangulated. Smothered and covered and drowned and dowsed in verbose thick treacle which will not come out even if you 

stab her neck, gauge stab in that cold hard glass tube and and and with hope wa-watch it flow

nothing fl

nothing flo

w

s

Though not for ever, a drop is left.

A faint echo of the thing she was emerging from you worms up from the ground beneath us, and we watch silently (what else can we do?)

Carried by you along this roughest of paths this thing grows

You brought it here, and you will save her with it

Not once but several times

Driving her forward because you know that she must

'I will be your strength'

crying helpfully opening nothing to the gorge of your neck

This is all you are allowed to show

You can speak this, a word of reassurance because it needs no word

You speak nothing.

She will not believe you,

But please

believe us

She will not die on your watch.