Love poems usually promise to hold someone up. This one promises to let everything go under. In five short lines, MADI imagines another person's mind as an ocean and makes a double vow: the speaker will swim there "forever", and the speaker's "secrets & dreams" will sink there "forever" too. The central idea is trust so complete that it borders on surrender. To love someone, the poem suggests, is to find a place vast enough to hide your inner life, and perhaps to lose it.
The metaphor is stated outright, with no "like" or "as": the ocean "that is your mind." It is the mind that gets chosen, not the heart or the body, so the intimacy imagined here is made of thoughts, moods and depths that can't be fully seen from the surface. By the second sentence the comparison has tightened further. The ocean is no longer "your mind" but simply "you": "In you, I will drown." The beloved has become a whole element to move through.
The verbs split the work between the speaker and what the speaker carries. The speaker swims, which is active and buoyant, and stays alive. The secrets and dreams are the ones that drown. Then comes "corpses", the harshest word in a quiet poem. If the secrets and dreams have corpses, they were living things first, and burying them means ending them. Pairing "dreams" with "secrets" is striking, because secrets are things we hide, while dreams are things we hope for. Judging by the imagery, the speaker is surrendering ambitions as well as shameful facts. Whether that is a gift or a sacrifice, the poem doesn't say.
There is no rhyme and no steady metre, and the shape of the lines does the work instead. The first three lines are short and hushed, almost spoken aloud, and they end on a calm "forever." The next line then sprawls. It runs on through the ampersand, "secrets & dreams and their corpses will sink forever," and the long, unbroken stretch has a downward drag, like something falling through water. The final line shrinks again to "for there is no bottom." The sentence ends on the very word it denies, and the stumble feels deliberate. The poem also changes register as it goes. The opening promises are contractions, "I'll swim" and "I'll stay," light and conversational. The second sentence gives way to the fuller "I will drown," as if a casual remark had hardened into a vow. The ampersand pulls the other way, looking hurried and modern against that solemnity.
Sound reinforces the theme. The s-sounds in "swim," "stay," "secrets," "sink" and "corpses" give the poem a faint hiss, like water closing over something. The word "forever" is the poem's only real echo, ending both sentences and working like a rhyme. Its meaning shifts between them. The first "forever" is romantic, a promise to remain. The second is attached to sinking corpses and sounds like a verdict. The same word turns from devotion into finality in the space of a few lines.
That double meaning is what makes the poem worth reading. "No bottom" can be read as comfort: the beloved's mind is so deep that nothing buried there will ever hit the floor, resurface or be judged. It can also be read as threat: what goes in cannot be recovered, and a depth with no bottom can't be fully known by the person swimming in it. The poem doesn't choose between sanctuary and oblivion, and the reader has to.
Even the presentation adds to this. The title appears in guillemets, «Oceans.», and is plural, while the poem speaks of a single ocean. That may hint that every person is an ocean, though that is an inference from the text rather than something the poem states. In a handful of lines, the poem turns a familiar romantic image into something more ambiguous: the sea as a bottomless place to hide in, and the cost of hiding there.