Lucie Tambora's "Ex-stalker" opens just as an obsession starts to fall apart. The speaker's head is "crowded with suspicious untrue tales," and the poem becomes a kind of audit, a trawl through memory to separate what happened from what was invented. The result is humiliating. The "abysmally great day" when the beloved "heard my cries" and the "wondrous moment" of "loving eyes" are lined up like items to be crossed out. By the third stanza the speaker admits to a "self-fed lie," a fantasy she or he has nourished for years.
The poem's central idea is that this was love without another person in it. The beloved is only ever "you," and the one detail given about them, those "loving eyes," belongs to the fantasy. The speaker admits that "all I ever did was obsessively observe," and the fifth stanza turns this into the poem's key question: "Can an image become a husband, or a wife?" The speaker has been a "mere shadow," following someone without ever being seen. The beloved is a blank throughout, and that blankness is the point.
The form suits this spiralling self-interrogation. There are six quatrains, and in most of them the first line is left unrhymed while the next three lock onto a single sound: *lies / cries / eyes*, *stars / bars / Mars*, *life / wife / strife*. The lines are long, around a dozen syllables, with a loose, uneven beat that never settles into strict regularity. Together these make a mind circling the same few thoughts, with the rhyme tightening like a trap. It also lets the poem be funny in a bleak way. In the second stanza the tender "honeyed whispers" and the night under the stars slide through "behind bars" and land on "people from Mars." The rhyme drags the speaker from romance to self-mockery, and the speaker seems to go along willingly: "I'm so ridiculous."
The pattern slips in the fourth stanza, where only *hatch* and *match* rhyme and the opening lines drift free. This is the stanza of confession, and the hedging language shows it: "or so I thought," then "Maybe, we could possibly be a fateful match?" The stacked qualifiers make a very small hope sound smaller. The image of a love story that might "hatch" casts the speaker as someone sitting on an egg, waiting passively for something to happen.
Water and fabric supply the other imagery. The speaker has "drowned" in a "satisfying daydream" and been "seized by the stream," while the lie is "bursting at a seam." The two images don't quite fit together, and perhaps they aren't meant to. The speaker is overwhelmed and leaking at once. The word "satisfying" matters here, because it admits that the fantasy gave real pleasure and that this is why it lasted.
The ending is the poem's sharpest turn. The "photographs taken by deception" are torn up, and the speaker mocks a grand self-image, "the belle of the ball," like a fairy-tale heroine. The stanza then shrinks to a flat little wish: "now I'm just desperate for a phone call." The word *call* answers *cries* from the first stanza. There the speaker imagined being heard, and here the demand is only to be contacted. The title adds to the unease. "Ex-stalker" claims the behaviour is over, but the last line sounds like a craving that hasn't gone. The poem never says whether the speaker has really changed.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses both excuses and glamour. It doesn't present obsession as passion, and the speaker rejects the label outright: "I'm not a poetic admirer, I'm a joke." It does not ask us to forgive anyone either. It stays inside one mind and lets us see how loneliness, daydreaming and self-deception can pass for love. Readers may feel sympathy and discomfort together. That is a hard balance to hold, and the poem holds it without ever raising its voice.