The strangest thing about Karen Bassey's "The Inevitable" is that the disaster it describes never arrives. The poem is made entirely of the moments before: a speaker who senses something terrible approaching and has stopped believing she can resist it. Its central idea is that dread can be a kind of defeat in itself. The worst part is not the blow but the exhausted certainty that it is coming, again.
The opening is its sharpest stroke. "My house has always been on fire / Why does it only burn now." The two lines contradict each other, and that is the point. Something that has always been burning should not suddenly start to burn. The speaker is describing a pain that was long present but only now felt. The second pair of lines repeats the pattern with "wounds" that "have always been there" but "only bleed now." The repeated "always" and "only" work like a hinge between a past of endurance and a present of collapse. Bassey does not say what the fire or the wounds are, and that vagueness is a choice. Because the cause stays unnamed, the poem can describe the feeling itself, and a reader can recognise it without needing the same story. The grammar slip in "The wounds has always been there" also leaves the voice unpolished, which suits a poem so concerned with rawness, whether the slip is deliberate or not.
The middle section turns from images to the body. First the speaker's senses are "heightened" and her fears "suppress" her. It is an odd verb, since we usually suppress our fears, and here the roles are reversed. Then comes the screaming: voices she "can't decipher," yet she knows they are "awful and dreadful." The doubled adjectives pile up like the panic itself, and "I just know it" admits that the knowledge has no evidence behind it. Then the poem physically changes shape. An indented, lowercase line, "my senses are numb," arrives with a trailing comma, and one word sits alone beneath it: "Lifeless." The heightened senses have not calmed down. They have overloaded and shut off, and the white space around that single word makes the silence audible.
The imagery of fire and blood gives way to water: "I'm drowning." What follows is the poem's most unsettling detail. The speaker is "not agitated or frightened" and feels "no urge to swim or fight the storm coming." The metaphor is slightly mixed, since she is already drowning while the storm is still coming, and that mismatch captures the way anticipation can feel as suffocating as the event. The small word "just" carries the emotional weight. "I just know it," then "I let it take me with it / I just let it." The word makes surrender sound casual, almost shrugging, and the casualness is what hurts. Her calm is a symptom, not peace.
Then she turns to the reader: "You know what's worse." The conversational tone pulls us close just before the threat gets bigger, a "monstrous feeling" that "eats me up." Over the poem the danger moves from a house, to the body, to the sea, to something with a mouth. It keeps getting closer to her.
The ending does not escape this loop. "Then I wonder when it all started" echoes the opening questions, and the final line, "It's coming, / once again I'm helpless," admits that this has happened before. The title makes sense now. The inevitable is not one event but a cycle the speaker feels trapped inside.
That is the poem's quiet achievement. It uses no rhyme and no regular rhythm, only short, plain lines and repetition, so it sounds less like composed verse than like someone thinking aloud at their lowest point. It gives shape to a feeling that is hard to explain to anyone who hasn't felt it: fear with no visible object and a strength that has simply run out.