"Do you know??" is built so that nobody can answer it. Bayanda Fedrick Buthelezi opens with a plain, almost gentle question, "Do you know what it feels like?", and then piles up so much detail that a quick "yes" or "no" would sound false. The poem never names its subject, but the images point to a mind crowded by thoughts of death. This is a person who dreads waking up and gets through the day on little more than the hope that it might be an improvement on the last one. Its central idea is that this kind of suffering is invisible from outside. The poem's only demand is that the reader try to feel it from within.
There is no rhyme and no steady metre, so the shape comes from repetition. After the opening line, everything is one long question, split into a chain of infinitive phrases: "To have death stalk your thoughts", "to have it haunt you", "to be so close", "to have it mindfuck you", "to not want to wake up". Each line starts the same way, like a list of symptoms or a series of blows. After the first "To" the capital letters disappear, so the lines read as one unbroken thought, which suits a mind that can't switch off. The lines also grow. The last one sprawls across "head-one with nothing / but duffel-bag eyes, a tired body and hopes of today being better than yesterday?", and reading it aloud leaves you short of breath, much like the exhaustion it describes. (The odd "head-one" is presumably "head-on", a small roughness that makes the poem feel spoken rather than polished.)
The imagery moves from the sky to the skin. A shadow is the most loyal companion anyone has, yet it disappears in the dark. Death here follows "more than your own shadow", so it never lets up, and it lives inside the thoughts rather than outside. Halloween is a night when fear is a costume and a game that ends by morning. Stretching it to "everyday" turns the holiday into a permanent haunting with no trick-or-treaters, only the fright. The comparison also shows a voice reaching for the references closest to hand rather than ornate poetic language. Then the poem gets physical: "the smell stanches your skin". "Stanches" normally means to stop a flow, as of blood, so it may be a slip for "stenches". Judging by the context, the idea is a smell clinging to the skin that can't be washed off. Death is no longer an abstract idea but something so near that it can be smelled.
Two word choices stand out. "Mindfuck" is the poem's bluntest word, and it refuses any polite euphemism. Placed beside "every night", it hints at sleeplessness and the hours when thoughts turn on you. "Duffel-bag eyes" is the best invention. The dark, swollen bags of a sleepless face become luggage, stuffed, heavy and hauled around everywhere. The same sentence lists three things the speaker faces reality with, "nothing / but" eyes, a body and hopes, and only the last isn't a deficit. Even then the hope is measured on the smallest scale. The wish is not for a good day, only a "better" one than yesterday.
The speaker never says "I". The experience is handed over in the second person, so the reader becomes the one being stalked, and the poem asks for empathy without pleading for it. The closing "Do You?", with its capital Y, lands differently from everything before it. After the lowercase run-on, those two words sound like someone leaning forward and holding your gaze. The title's doubled question mark carries the same urgency, perhaps the frustration of someone tired of being misunderstood. The poem then stops, with no answer and no consolation.
That refusal is what makes it significant. Poems on this subject often explain, reassure or offer a way out. This one simply insists on describing what it feels like, in casual, unguarded language that sounds like a real voice. For readers who have lived something similar, there is the relief of seeing it put into words. For those who haven't, it is a lesson in how much can hide behind an ordinary day. And if the poem feels uncomfortably familiar, that is a good reason to talk to someone you trust.