A broken bridge is the whole plot of Dave Bonta's "Ghosted," and it turns out to be enough. In six short lines, set as three couplets with no punctuation and no capital letters, a journey is stopped, a cold night is endured, and the speaker ends up unsure whether they are awake at all.
The poem begins in the flat language of a practical report. "the bridge out" has no verb, like a hand-lettered road sign, and "we stayed a cold night" is plain past tense, the kind of thing you might say the next morning. Nothing here is frightening yet. But a bridge is an old image of crossing from one state to another, and once it is gone the travellers are stuck on the wrong side of something. The poem never says this outright. It lets the word "out" do the work.
The second couplet is where the poem changes register. "our way a vein / of spirits and apparitions" again leaves out the verb, so the way does not resemble a vein, it simply is one. That small gap makes the metaphor feel like a fact. A vein carries something, and here it carries not blood but spirits, so the route seems to have become a living channel. The word can also mean a seam of ore running through rock, something hidden that you stumble into without meaning to. Either way, the detour forced on the travellers has turned into a passage they are inside of. The line itself swells, too. "spirits and apparitions" is the longest phrase in the poem, and its hissing s sounds and stacked near-synonyms give the feeling of a crowd thickening. Quietly, the long *a* of "stayed," "way" and "vein" links the night, the road and the vein into one sound.
The last couplet loosens the poem's grip on reality. "stories old as fear" is a striking comparison, because it is not "old as time" or "old as the hills." Ghost stories are measured against fear itself, as if they were not inventions but the oldest reply to the dark. The poem does not say who is telling them. They might be what the travellers told to pass the night, or what the place seems to whisper back. There is also a faint echo across the poem, since the "cold" of line two returns as the "old" of line six. It is not a rhyme at the line endings, but it carries a physical chill into something ancient.
Then comes "am I not asleep," with no question mark. It could be a real question, a hope or a flat statement, and the poem will not say which. The negative phrasing is a trap. "Am I not asleep?" invites the comforting answer yes, but nothing in the poem supplies it. Notice too that "we" and "our" have given way to "I." Judging by the text, the company has fallen away, either because the speaker's thoughts have turned inward or because the companions were never entirely solid. The poem leaves that open.
The title adds another layer. In current usage, to be "ghosted" often means to be cut off by someone who simply stops answering, and it can also mean to be haunted. Both fit. The broken bridge is a severed connection, and the road is full of spirits. Setting a casual modern word beside "stories old as fear" makes the poem feel as if an ancient dread has slipped into everyday speech.
What makes the poem worth studying is its restraint. It never describes a ghost. Instead it builds unease out of absences: missing verbs, missing punctuation, a missing companion, a missing answer. For a student reader it shows how much a poem can do by leaving things out, and how a question left hanging can unsettle a reader more than any apparition. The poem stops mid-doubt, so the reader is left in the same uncertainty as the speaker.