The poem opens with a line that sounds like a caption on a children's party invitation: "Halloween. The night of the pumpkins, ghosts and vampires." It is flat and cheerful, and it sets up the holiday's usual cast. Then the next line cuts it down to something private: "I am haunted tonight." The costume ghosts are decoration, but this one is real. The poem is dated 10/31/15, the night it describes, and its present tense keeps the feeling fresh, as if each line is written while the evening is still happening.
We never learn who "you" is. The poem says only that the speaker is "haunted by your ghost," and the word works whether the person has died or simply gone, so the poem seems to leave that open. What matters is the effect: "And everytime it screams / I screem too but." The speaker's scream mirrors the ghost's, and the line breaks on "but," leaving the sentence hanging. Then comes a second presence: "This creature inside me is louder than my mind." The haunting is double, a ghost outside and a creature within, and feeling has drowned out reason. The spelling slips here ("screem," "teake") make the text look like a first draft. They do not hide the urgency, though they do blur lines that deserve to be crisp.
The turning point is a plain, practical line: "I teake a deep breath, take my keys and leave this house." After all the screaming, it is made of small ordinary actions, and it is the longest, most prose-like line so far. Notice too that it says "this house," not "my house." The house is where the ghost lives. Outside, the poem widens. The speaker looks up and sees "clouds, birds, stars / And the moon too." The list loosens as it goes, and "And the moon too" sounds like something noticed late, once the mind has quieted. The speaker then whispers "Words that come to my mouth," which suggests they arrive unplanned.
The image that holds the poem together comes next: "The cold autmn air / Turns my breath into steam." Breath becomes visible, and the colon turns that steam into speech. A speaker who has been haunted by a ghost now exhales something pale and ghostlike of their own, a shape that appears and fades. What it says is the poem's center: "Love me / Like you love the sky / With all it's darkness / With all it's stars." The sky is what the speaker has just been looking at, and it contains darkness and light without apology. No one asks the night to give up its blackness to be admired. The plea is to be loved whole, including the part that screams. It also matters that "darkness" comes before "stars." The speaker names the hard part first. The lines are short, each about the length of one visible breath.
The ending refuses comfort. "My breath is stagnant as I start to walk faster" is a puzzling clash, since breath that was moving steam now feels stuck, as if the chest is tight. The speaker hurries "So that I may / Come home in time." In time for what is never said. Judging by the date, perhaps before the night ends, though the poem leaves it open. The walk finishes where it started, at the haunted house. The sky gives no answer, and the modest "may" sounds more like hope than certainty.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no regular rhyme or meter. Its rhythm comes from line length: longer lines carry actions (taking keys, walking), and short lines carry emotion ("Love me"). Repetition does the work rhyme might otherwise do, in "haunted / Haunted," "sky" and "stars," and the echo of the scream.
The poem matters because it takes a holiday built on costumes and plastic fright and finds in it a believable adult ache: a haunting no mask can explain, and a wish to be accepted entire. Its language is plain, and its best idea, that love should treat a person like the night sky, is allowed to stand on its own. With careful proofreading, such as "its" in place of "it's," its images would land even more cleanly.