Most love poems begin with the beloved. Sinethemba Mnukwa's "Get Hurt" begins with the mind. The speaker has been "asking myself the other day" how clever it is that a brain can build a picture of someone and then keep returning to it. He goes so far as to praise "how much vision it has and how much anticipation it blossoms." The compliment is oddly formal, and the word "reminiscing" is stranger still. We reminisce about the past, yet this face seems to belong to a woman he has only seen, so memory and wishing have blurred together. From the first lines, then, the poem is less about a woman than about how thoughts and feelings are produced.
That opening admiration soon turns uneasy. The image arrives uninvited: "I couldn't keep out the image of her face." The speaker's self-diagnosis is a stumble: "I really don't know what it is, it could be lust. / Well really it could be but," and there the line simply stops. The dangling "but" is one of the poem's best touches. The rhythm of the whole piece is the rhythm of a man talking himself in circles, with long, rolling sentences at the start, then short, broken lines whenever he loses his nerve. There is no rhyme and no regular beat. The line breaks fall where a hesitant speaker would pause, or where he would change his mind.
The middle of the poem speaks directly to us. "Have you ever seen a woman and felt like..." is repeated three times, and each repetition raises the stakes. First he wants to pour out "unknown feelings," which are unknown even to him. Then he wants to hear "the sweet melodic sound of her voice," a desire that is gentler but also more specific. Finally he wants to ask her "to be yours," followed by a hurried self-correction: "I mean like forever." That phrase, with its casual "like," is very youthful and endearing. It also shows how fast a flicker of attraction has swelled into a lifelong claim. The poem then does something clever with its own structure. A quoted voice answers, "Yes, I feel like that," and another asks, "So what's stopping you?" The poem never says who is speaking, but since it began with the speaker questioning himself, the most natural reading is that he is interrogating himself.
His answer is the poem's real centre: "The fact that, I could be loving the feeling of loving her." The sentence turns back on itself, with the feeling as its own object, and the structure shows the trap. Notice, too, how absent the woman is. She has no name and does nothing. She is only a face and a hypothetical voice, both supplied by the speaker's imagination. The "vision" he praised at the start is now the suspect. A second "The fact that" brings the harsher word, "pure lust not love," and again he reaches for "I mean" to sharpen himself, as he did with "forever."
The ending refuses comfort. "I'm afraid it isn't what it seems to be or how I imagine it to be" admits that his imagination may be unreliable. Then comes the flat, almost childlike "I'm just scared, because people might get hurt." The "just" shrinks the fear, and "people" is conveniently vague. Is he protecting her, himself, or both? The title, "Get Hurt," sounds like a command but turns out to be a dread, and the poem leaves the speaker frozen between the two.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about a common confusion: not knowing whether you want a person or the pleasure of wanting. The language is mostly plain, with a few grand words ("melodic," "anticipation") that sound like a young mind trying to look composed. Because the speaker never decides, the poem feels true to life. It gives us a mind caught in the act of doubting its own best creation.