Four times the poem says "There it is again," and never once says what "it" is. That withheld noun drives the whole piece. We get symptoms, sounds and gestures, but the thing itself stays out of sight, which makes it feel both more personal and more menacing. Even the title, three asterisks where a name should be, seems to shrug: some things resist labels.
On the surface, the poem is about pain that keeps coming back, and the exhaustion of knowing it will. What the pain actually is, the text never says. Judging by the vocabulary of "hitting," "clawing," "blank stares" and "lying," it could be violence, an abusive situation, a battle inside one's own head, or a mixture in which the line between outside and inside blurs. The reader doesn't have to choose. What the poem does make clear is its emotional climate: dread, familiarity and, finally, resignation.
The most arresting phrase comes early: "That all so welcoming pain." Pain is not usually welcoming, and the oxymoron jolts. It suggests the speaker has lived with this so long that it has become a kind of home, something that opens its arms even as it hurts. The slightly old-fashioned "all so" adds an odd politeness, like greeting a visitor who always turns up uninvited. The next two lines undercut that hospitality: "The hurt / The drowning." Drowning is the poem's one sustained image, and it echoes forward. When the second stanza arrives with "The screaming / The hitting / And clawing," clawing can be read as what a person does to reach the surface, or what a struggling person does to whoever is nearby. The poem never settles who is hitting and who is being hit, and that uncertainty is unsettling.
The construction is plain, and the plainness does work. There is no real rhyme. In some accents "again" chimes faintly with "pain" in the first stanza, but it is more an echo than a pattern. There is no regular metre either. The lines are short, each fragment landing like a flinch or a blow. The repeated opener works like a refrain, or a door that keeps opening onto the same room. Under that refrain, the lists change character. The first stanza gives sensations, the second gives sounds and physical acts, and the third turns quieter and more calculating: "The blank stares / The planning / And the lying." The move from noise to silence is chilling. After the screaming comes numbness, and with it concealment. "Planning" is the most open word in the poem, because we are not told what is being planned. Placed between the stares and the lies, it suggests secrecy, a life managed behind a face that gives nothing away.
Grammar adds to the effect. Nearly every line is a noun phrase with no one doing anything: "The hurt," "The hitting," "The lying." The word "I" never appears. The speaker is absent as a grammatical subject, only a place where these things happen, which suggests powerlessness or numbness.
The final stanza is half the length of the others, and its register drops. "And its not gonna leave" is flat and colloquial, with a missing apostrophe and a casual "gonna" that make it sound like a thought muttered aloud rather than a composed line. After the careful accumulation of images, the voice stops decorating. The lists end because there is nothing left to add. Opening with "And" makes the line feel like a verdict nobody wanted to deliver.
This is what gives the poem its force. Many poems about suffering describe one terrible moment. This one describes a loop and makes the reader sit inside it. The repetition enacts what it describes, since each "There it is again" is another turn of the wheel. It offers no consolation, no turn toward hope and no explanation, and its refusal to explain keeps it open. A reader who recognises the feeling can fill the gap with their own experience, which suggests how little language is needed to make pain recognisable.