"Shoal Complex"
A Poem
“Shoal Complex”
Each time I fall down the rabbit hole Or push the envelope too far in your direction, I am caught in a web of my own incessant obsessions. Like the scattered parts of once anchored, now severed souls, I drift away in a lifeboat, holding to an unclaimed heart already broken. Inevitably, I return to beg at your locked door: hungry, desperate, & orphaned. The lighthouse of what we could be beckons me slowly out of my exile. Sustaining my mad ship captain through tossing & churning oceans, You sit cross-legged, radiating serenity and something unspoken. Invented secrets cloud my vision, disguising real emotion. Winding down wayward paths, the sickness creeps, Pulling my yearnings back down to the deep, Leaving only lies visible in the shoal.
This is beautifully unsettling. What struck me most is how the poem keeps shifting between longing and self-recognition, as though the speaker understands the pattern even while being pulled deeper into it. The maritime imagery gives the emotional confusion real shape, and that final line leaves everything suspended in exactly the right way.
Oh yes!