Ghosts are supposed to haunt other people. In Timothy Jordan's "Misguided Ghosts", they mostly haunt themselves, because what they run from is their own mistakes. The poem takes the figure of the ghost, usually a frightening one, and makes it a picture of ordinary human drift: people who feel lost, blame themselves, and keep moving to avoid what they've done. Its central idea is that this loneliness can be answered, not by becoming flawless, but by finding someone to be flawed alongside.
The opening lines set up the scattered, restless world. "We are all scattered / We are followed by the roads." The second line quietly reverses the usual logic. Normally we follow roads, but here the roads chase us, as if the paths we've taken keep catching up. The next line, "We make our own mistakes", reads as if it were about freedom, but the word "own" also hints at responsibility, since nobody else can carry these errors for us. When the speaker narrows from "we" to "I am one of those ghosts", the poem becomes confessional, and the repeated "I make my own mistakes / And I run from them" is plain and unprotected.
That plainness is the poem's chief technique. There is no regular rhyme scheme and no punctuation, and the lines are short, conversational and mostly self-contained, so the poem moves like someone talking carefully, one thought at a time. Repetition does the work that rhyme might otherwise do. "Mistakes" appears three times, "run from them" twice, and "We are all Ghosts" is stated flatly, then pressed on the reader with "So are you." That line is the poem's turning point. The speaker stops describing and starts addressing someone, and the pronouns drift in a pattern worth watching: "we," then "I," then "you," then "we" again. By the time the speaker says "we run from them," the running has become shared. The mistakes haven't gone away, but the fleeing is no longer solitary.
The middle of the poem makes its boldest word choice: "we entitle eachother with our trust." "Entitle" is an unusual verb here. It suggests giving someone a right or a claim, so trust becomes something the two people grant each other as a kind of status. Right after it comes an admission that undercuts any fairy-tale idea of love: "Then we fail sometimes." The word "sometimes" is almost casual, as if failure were weather rather than catastrophe. The reply is simple and future-facing: "But we will come back / And love again." Love here is not a state that holds once achieved. It is something people return to after failing, and the poem's confidence rests on that.
The image of "Hand in hand" carries a small paradox. Ghosts are by definition intangible, yet these two hold on to each other, and the touch is what makes them feel solid. The closed-up spelling "eachother," whether intended or not, even looks like two things fused into one.
The ending gathers the poem's loose threads. "Place" is the key word. In the first lines everyone is scattered and chased by roads, so nobody has a fixed place. Then comes "I've found my place / And it's with you," and a few lines later "We've found our place / And it's together." The shift from "my" to "our" mirrors the whole journey, and "place" turns out to be a relationship, not a location. Only now does the title's adjective appear in the body, in the capitalised "Two Misguided Ghosts." The ending also echoes sound: "eachother" and the final word "together" share a closing note, as though the lines settle into a rhyme at the moment the speakers settle.
The poem is not complicated, and its mistakes are never specified. That vagueness is a limit, but also an opening, since any reader can fill the gap with their own regrets. Judging by the direct address and the phrase "love again," the "you" seems to be a partner, though a close friend could fit too. Its significance lies in its gentleness. It treats being "misguided" not as a verdict but as a shared condition, and it offers a modest, believable hope: nobody stops being a ghost, but nobody has to be one alone.