Nobody in "Ghosts" is ever seen whole. The speaker dreams of mouths, only mouths, with no faces, bodies or eyes, hanging open and drifting steadily closer. The nightmare keeps coming back ("some nights", then "i always wake up"), and the poem's central idea is that fear of this kind doesn't end when the dream does. Waking is supposed to be the escape hatch, but here it only moves the horror from the mind to the skin.
The imagery is deliberately repellent, and it works by piling up the body's least dignified details. The teeth are "yellow, decaying", the gums have "sores all along the sides", and the tongues carry "wet blisters". The poem never settles for a general phrase like "scary mouths". It zooms in so close that the reader is made to inspect the inside of them, which is the uncomfortable closeness the dream forces on the speaker. Smell joins sight when the breath turns out to be hot and musty. "Musty" is a good choice because it belongs to shut cupboards and old rooms, and it suggests something long dead breathing out. That suits the title, since a ghost is something that should be gone and isn't.
The most striking decision is typographical. Everything is lowercase and there is no punctuation at all, which gives the poem an unguarded, half-asleep voice. Then, in the long third line, the spaces vanish: "andwetblistersontheirtonguestheirbreathishotandmusty..." The reader has to pick the words apart one by one, and that effort is the point. The line tells us the breath is "dominating my senses", and the layout dominates our reading in the same way. There is no gap to breathe in and no place to pause, just as the speaker has no room to move. The line also seems to crowd forward like the mouths, then breaks off at "get". The poem suddenly slows to "closer / and / closer", each word alone on its line. After the rush, the white space stretches out the approach like slow motion, so that we feel every last inch. Dream time is both crushing and dragged out.
The second stanza looks calmer, with ordinary spacing and a plain statement: "i always wake up just before they reach me." But "always" is the chilling word, because it tells us this has happened many times and will happen again. "Just before" means the speaker never finds out what the mouths would do. Would they bite, kiss, swallow or speak? The poem withholds the answer, and that gap is more frightening than any answer would be. There is no rhyme to round the lines off neatly either. The only echoes are of the nightmare itself, as "rolling tongues" and "hot breaths" return in the waking stanza, like images that won't leave the speaker's head.
Then the final line slips out of control. "But i can still feel them crawlingallovermyskin" collapses into one unbroken string again, at the moment the speaker thought they were safe. The sense has shifted from sight and smell to touch, and the verb "crawling" turns tongues and breath into something like insects. The poem ends without a full stop, so the feeling is left unfinished, just as it is for the speaker.
The title says "Ghosts", yet no ghost appears. The mouths themselves seem to be the haunting, and the poem never explains what they stand for. Judging by the imagery, they could be read as anything that presses in and won't be shaken off, such as a memory, guilt or shame. The poem gives no biography or backstory, and it doesn't need one.
What makes it worth studying is how much it does with so little. Its vocabulary is plain, but the spacing carries as much of the fear as the images do. Removing the gaps between words makes the reader feel the speaker's suffocation, and separating the last three words makes us feel the dread of waiting. It's a small lesson in how layout can be part of the meaning.