Ghosts are supposed to haunt other people, but the speaker of "Spooks" seems haunted by an absence: the absence of feeling. The subtitle «Asking» tells us how the poem will work. Nearly every stanza is built around a question, and none receives an answer. What begins as a murmur about silence ends as a fear that the speaker may be unable to love at all.
The opening is quietly sarcastic. "Lovely is it not?" sounds like a remark about a pleasant evening, but "In silence you get lost" sours it at once, and the second stanza answers with a flat "It's not isn't it?" The loveliness was ironic. The "solitary frost" is the poem's first image of cold, and cold keeps returning in disguise. Novocain is the sharpest example. It numbs the mouth so that you "Feel nothing / Even if you're supposed to feel something." The image treats numbness as feeling wrongly switched off, which is more specific than simple emptiness. The candy cane then makes the loss smaller and sadder: forgetting a childhood taste. Most candy canes are peppermint, so the sweetness is a cold one, which may quietly echo the frost.
The pronouns shift as the poem goes on. In the first two stanzas "you" gets lost and muted, as if the speaker were describing a general condition. Then comes "Never been happy, even just a bit," a line with no subject at all and the plainest in the poem. By the fourth stanza it is "Never have I," and by the last, "I've lost that capability." The questions put to the reader ("Have you ever used Novocain?" "Have you ever been in love?") read like a run-up, a way of working toward a confession.
Structurally, the poem is tidy. It has six quatrains, each rhymed ABBA, with one pair of rhymes wrapped around another: *lost* and *frost* inside *not* and *caught*, *voice* and *choice* inside *it* and *bit*. Some rhymes are exact, such as Novocain and candy cane. Others are slant, such as *not* and *caught*, or *person* and *reason*. Against this neat pattern the rhythm is loose and speech-like, with no steady metre. Lines run from the two-word "Feel nothing" to the tangled "Never have I ever have such feeling with no rhyme or reason." That line stumbles on its doubled "have" and borrows the casual party-game phrase "Never have I ever" for something heavy. It also announces "no rhyme or reason" in a stanza that rhymes. Whether or not this was planned, the gap between tidy form and messy feeling is hard to miss.
The imagery of love is just as telling. Love is something "sent from above," a gift the speaker has "lost," and also, in the next stanza, "a hit from a bat," a sudden blunt impact. It is either heaven-sent or violent, but never ordinary or gentle, and this shows how far away it feels. The speaker, by contrast, is a "numb pathetic vessel," a container with nothing in it. Here the title comes into focus: a spook is a ghost, and a ghost is a presence with no body's warmth. The speaker seems to be haunting their own life. The rhyme of "capability" with "ability" barely moves, as though the speaker is going in circles, still possessing some ability but unable to use it. That reading is an inference, but the near-repetition supports it.
The question "Is love even more painful?" is the most revealing. The words "even more" imply that the present numbness already hurts. The final line, "Is it bitter yet blissful?", leaves both possibilities open, and the speaker can't say which, because they have never felt either.
What gives the poem its force is that it describes an experience that is easy to overlook. It is not heartbreak but the fear of never being able to be heartbroken, and of wanting even pain as proof of being alive. The blunt wording, the slightly awkward lines and the unanswered questions make the confession feel unpolished. They also leave the reader with the same uncertainty as the speaker.