Pain, the speaker admits in the second line, might not even be the right word for what is happening. "If you can even call it that" is a small hedge, but it sets the terms for everything that follows: an experience that outruns language, described in twenty short lines. The sequence is clear enough. Something wraps around the speaker's head, hearing fades, the body falls and thrashes, and then comes waking in the arms of someone who is crying. The poem never names a cause. The sudden loss of vision and control and the waking afterwards might suggest a seizure or something like it, but that is an inference, and the poem withholds a diagnosis. The reader stays inside the sensation rather than looking at it from outside. The central idea is that pain isolates, and that even a loving witness can hold the sufferer without entering the experience. The speaker can only say one thing.
The form carries this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, just free verse chopped into fragments. Many lines have no verb at all: "My vision, gone." "My body, not in control." The repeated "My" (head, vision, fear, body) sounds like possession, but each time it introduces something being lost. The nearest thing to a beat is "Thrashing, hurting, aching," three *-ing* words stacked in a row. The pile-up mimics a body out of control, and it echoes the earlier "Wraps" and "Strangling," so the sound of that ending keeps recurring.
The imagery is built around water. The speaker's ears "fill with water," the head is "not swimming," blood "drips like a faucet," and finally the tears arrive. The speaker seems to be submerged, with the world muffled and pressing in. The phrase "My head, not swimming. / But kissing the ground softly" is the most interesting moment. It rejects the usual cliché for dizziness and replaces it with a fall described in a tender verb. The softness clashes with the blood in the next line, and it also anticipates the gentleness that comes later, when the lover "cradles" the speaker's head. "White surrounded by red" is left unexplained. It could be read as a flash of white vision ringed with red, or as the whites of the eyes. The poem offers no key, so the image works as raw perception.
Notice also how the senses go out one by one: hearing ("Silence"), then sight ("gone"), then control. What returns first is touch. The speaker wakes to "tears on my cheeks. / Not my own, but my love's." She identifies the grief by feeling it on her skin, which makes the line feel true to a half-conscious mind. The poem's attention also widens here. Until now it has itemised a body in pieces (head, ears, vision, limbs). Now there are two people in a scene.
The lover's words arrive in an odd way. "Gently, / It's going to be okay" has no quotation marks and a dangling comma, as if the reassurance reaches the speaker through fog and only half belongs to her own narration. "He cries for me. But not for himself" is flat and short. I read it as noticing that his tears are pure concern, with no self-pity in them, though the poem leaves room for other readings.
Then comes the ending. "All I can say is." closes with a full stop where a colon would be expected, so the sentence fails to deliver and the final line has to start fresh: "It HURTS." The capitals turn the title's quiet "Hurts" into a shout. After strangling hands, water and a dripping faucet, the poem drops metaphor altogether and lands on a bare verb with nothing attached to it. The speaker is given comfort and answers with the truth instead of agreeing that it will be okay.
That refusal is what makes the poem worth reading. It does not turn suffering into a lesson or a recovery story. It shows how much feeling short, broken lines can hold, and it leaves the reader in the gap between the person who comforts and the person who hurts.