"I had a guest last night" sounds like the start of a casual anecdote, the sort of thing you'd say over breakfast. By the end of the second line the tone has curdled. The guest "crawled on top of me," and the poem turns into something close to a nightmare told in a flat, steady voice. Nothing in the text tells us who or what the guest is, and that uncertainty is where the poem gets its force.
Two readings sit side by side. The first is literal and creaturely. A thing that crawls, picks "the best spot" and forces its way in could be a tick, a bug, or some other parasite feeding on a sleeper. The second is human: an unwanted presence in the night, an intrusion on the body, a violation. The poem never settles the question, and judging by the language it doesn't try to. The speaker describes the visitor with the cool attention of someone looking at a specimen, and that detachment may be how the poem shows a mind holding itself apart from something it can't bear.
The word "guest" does a lot of work. A guest is invited, welcomed, given the best room. Here the word is used ironically, as if politeness could still describe what happened. The gap between that courteous noun and the verb "force" is the poem's central tension. Courtesy is the language the speaker has to hand, and it fails.
Structurally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter. Its lines are short, from two to five syllables, which gives it a held-breath quality. The line breaks control the pace precisely. "Chose the best spot" is made of blunt single-syllable words, and the line stops dead, as though the choice were cold and deliberate. Then "to force himself in" lands on a hard, final preposition. The poem has no punctuation beyond a single comma at the end of each of the first two lines, and it ends without a full stop. The experience isn't closed off, and the last words, "deep into me," seem to keep going.
The most unsettling detail is the image of the eyes. The poem breaks off after "his eyes," then spends three lines on a strange description: "so curiously mounted / on his shoulders." The sentence delays its verb, stretching the noun phrase out until "working their way" finally arrives, so the syntax itself seems to burrow slowly. "Curiously" has two senses, oddly and inquisitively, and both are disturbing. The eyes are set in an unnatural place, and they are curious about the speaker, which makes the looking itself a kind of entry. "Mounted" adds more. It can suggest jewels set in a ring, a rider on a horse, or a specimen pinned for display. Strangely, the one who ends up feeling displayed is the speaker.
The pronoun "me" ends line two and line nine, so the poem is bracketed by the speaker's body, first as a surface to climb on and then as a space to be entered. In between, the speaker is only the object of other people's verbs: crawled, chose, force, working. Nothing in the poem gives the speaker an action, which captures helplessness without saying the word.
The poem also begins in the middle. Its title is a row of three asterisks, a placeholder rather than a name. That fits a text about something with no proper name, something the speaker can only describe from the outside, piece by piece, beginning with a euphemism and ending in a gaze.
Its significance lies in this restraint. It doesn't shout or explain, and it names no emotion. It trusts one ordinary word, "guest," and one odd anatomical detail to carry the horror, so the reader feels the violation before deciding what it is. The ambiguity is part of the effect: whether read as a parasite, an assault, or a nightmare, it leaves the reader in the speaker's position, awake in the dark and unable to say exactly what is happening.