Karen Bassey's poem is about the dread of a pain that has been there all along and is only now breaking through. The opening questions set this up: the house has always been on fire, the wounds have always been there, so why does everything hurt only now? The speaker never answers, which makes the confusion feel real.
From there the feeling shifts. At first the speaker's senses are sharp, and their fears are loud voices they can't quite make out but know are terrible. Then everything goes numb. Drowning becomes the central image, and what stands out is the lack of struggle: no panic, no urge to swim, just letting the storm take them. That calm is more unsettling than fear would be.
The mood is heavy and exhausted. The speaker senses something awful approaching and feels too worn down to resist. The ending, "once again I'm helpless," suggests this has happened before, and that the dread is part of a cycle.