"Haunted" opens with an order and an act of violence: "Bite off your tongue, / spit out the blood". Then comes the paradox the whole poem turns on: do this "& say something more than / any word ever could." Self-mutilation is presented as the most eloquent speech available. The poem imagines language as a possession, and it asks what you would have to destroy to be free of it, or to hear what lies beneath it.
The poem is addressed to a "you" and runs almost entirely in the imperative, like a set of instructions for a ritual. The instructions grow more brutal and more domestic at once. The wound is sealed "with white-hot metal" (cauterising, a medieval kind of surgery) and then "stuff[ed] with wire wool", an abrasive scouring material from a kitchen cupboard. The hissing s-sounds of "seal," "stuff," "stifle," "scream" make the passage sound like the silencing it describes. Then the poem catches a strange psychological moment: "a weak / edge where laughter descends / into desperation or cruelty." Laughter, desperation and cruelty sit on one slope, and the poem suggests they are closer together than we like to think.
Language here acts on its own. "The words that form & try to force / open your mouth" are almost like intruders or spirits, not tools the speaker controls, and this is where the title begins to bite. We are "bodies haunted / by language." The word "these," not "our," holds the speaker slightly apart, as if observing a condition rather than confessing one.
The poem's boldest claim comes in the middle. Silence, it says, lets us discover "an unspoken secret; / the obscene foundation / of everything keeping us safe / from what awaits within." "Obscene" originally suggests something that should stay offstage, and the poem uses it that way: speech and civilisation become a protective surface over something we are afraid to face. The secret is then compared to "a swallowed stone" that will "kill or be expelled." The image is physical and heavy, and the verb "Waits" echoes "awaits" from a few lines earlier, so the threat seems to repeat inside the body.
Sacrifice follows, and the tone wobbles in a revealing way. The lost tongue is a "ritual sacrifice," a "necessary / price to be paid," but then also a "ridiculous / offering." The speaker will not let the ritual feel purely solemn. That self-mockery makes the poem more honest, because it admits how absurd it is to feed a body part to "the infinite & the horror it brings…". The trailing ellipsis refuses to say what the horror is.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no regular rhythm or rhyme, though "blood" and "could" in the opening lines look like a rhyme on the page while sounding different, a small mismatch that fits a poem about words failing. The staggered indentation leaves gaps in the middle of lines, like pauses where breath or speech is held back. Semicolons and ampersands keep the sentences running on, while the single line "Let no sound out." lands as a command with nothing around it. The poem has fewer pauses and more white space exactly where it asks for silence.
The ending reverses the earlier order. At first the words "force / open your mouth" and must be resisted. Now the instruction is "Open your mouth, / let it all out." Because the tongue is gone, "all sounds are one." A scream, a laugh and a word can no longer be told apart, which echoes the earlier collapse of laughter into desperation. This could be liberation, a return to something before language, or it could be the horror itself, the loss of meaning. The poem does not say, and that ambiguity is its strength.
What makes "Haunted" worth reading is how far it pushes a familiar thought: that words both express us and wall us off from ourselves. By staging that idea as a bloody, almost absurd ritual, it makes the reader feel the cost of speech, and the dread of what it might be hiding.