"Complacent" is a strange word to open with, because complacency usually means comfort, and the speaker of "my pollution." is anything but comfortable. Within a few lines the word is joined by "stuck," "cornered," and "shattered." The speaker is not lounging in a rut but trapped in one, and has noticed that the stillness is a kind of failure. The poem is about the collapse of self-protection and about what happens to that collapse once it can't be kept private. Its central idea sits in the last line, where a personal breakdown becomes something other people have to breathe.
The poem is published under the name cloverthoughts, and the text is all we have to go on, so it is worth reading closely. The first stanza-like movement is made of flat, self-accusing statements: "stuck in the same spot. / never growing. never progressing." The repeated "never" and the two -ing words suggest a loop with no end. Nearly every line stops at a full stop, which gives the voice a clipped, tired quality, like someone listing their faults because explaining them would take too much energy. Single-word lines such as "cornered." and "shattered." work like slammed doors. They sit alone on the page, surrounded by white space, which makes them feel as isolating as they sound.
The imagery changes state as the poem goes on, and that is its cleverest structural move. First come walls, solid and architectural: "All of the walls i've built as protection are slowly crumbling." The simile that follows, "Like they were never there in the first place," is quietly devastating. It suggests the protection was never as real as the speaker believed. Then the walls become "pieces of life" that the speaker scrambles to reassemble, a verb that makes the effort sound frantic and clumsy. Next the pieces are "shattered," a word more at home with glass than brick, so the metaphor has already slipped sideways. Finally everything "went up in a cloud of smoke," a twist on the idiom "up in smoke." The solid has turned to fragments, the fragments to gas. Once something is smoke it cannot be rebuilt, which is why "it's no use" is not just pessimism but an accurate description of the poem's own imagery.
The last two lines turn that smoke into an environmental problem. "now polluting the earth" has no subject, and the grammar is slightly adrift. It could be the smoke that pollutes, or the lost certainty, or the speaker. That ambiguity seems fitting, because the speaker can no longer separate themselves from the damage. Pollution is also a loaded choice of metaphor. It is a by-product, not a deliberate attack, and it harms people who never agreed to receive it. Calling their own despair "pollution" suggests the speaker feels guilt as well as pain, a fear of being toxic simply by existing in a bad state. The title, with its possessive "my," claims ownership of that harm before the poem begins.
Then comes the final line: "my grey cloud is now yours." Until this point the poem has been all "i" and "my," and the sudden "yours" breaks the pattern. It can be read two ways. It might be an apology, an admission that the speaker's low mood has spread to friends, family, or whoever is reading. It might equally be a handing-over, almost an accusation, as though the reader has been given something they didn't ask for. The poem doesn't choose, and that gives the ending its charge. "Grey" is also a careful colour: not black, not dramatic, just dull and heavy, which matches the dreary tone of "never progressing."
The formatting adds to the effect. Capitalisation wanders, with "I'm" and "All" and "Like" capitalised while "i've," "i scramble," and "shattered" are not. The lowercase "i" in particular reads as a self made small, though it may simply be a stylistic habit, and the poem gives us no way to tell. There is no rhyme and no steady metre; the lines swell in the middle, where the walls are described, and shrink again as things fall apart, so the shape of the poem mimics the collapse it describes.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so few lines. It moves from self-criticism to ruin to a small, unsettling act of sharing, and it does so by letting one metaphor decay into another, so the reader feels the loss of solidity as well as being told about it.