Great. I thought of the same solution too, but I feared it would be too slow. I was not able to come with a faster one, though: 
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

use Test::More;
use Benchmark qw(cmpthese);

my @arr_s  = qw/! my name ! is ! Achint ! I need ! help/;
my @arr_ns = qw/  my name ! is ! Achint ! I need ! help/;

sub simple {
    my @arr1 = split / *(!) */, join(' ', @_);
    shift @arr1 unless length $arr1[0];
    return \@arr1;
}

sub complex {
    my @arr2;
    my $x = 0;
    my $step = 1;
    for (@_) {
        if ('!' eq $_) {
            $x += $step;
            push @arr2, '!';
        } else {
            $arr2[$x] .= (defined $arr2[$x] ? ' ' : q()) . $_;
        }
        $step = 2;
    }
    return \@arr2;
}

print join ' # ', @{simple(@arr_s)},  "\n";
print join ' | ', @{simple(@arr_ns)}, "\n";

is_deeply([simple(@arr_s )], [complex(@arr_s )]);
is_deeply([simple(@arr_ns)], [complex(@arr_ns)]);


done_testing();

cmpthese(-5,
          { simple  => sub { simple(@arr_s);  simple(@arr_ns)  },
            complex => sub { complex(@arr_s); complex(@arr_ns) },
          });

[download]

Results on my netbook: 

           Rate complex  simple
complex 10723/s      --     -5%
simple  11262/s      5%      --

[download]
لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ

In reply to Re^2: Separating array contents by choroba
in thread Separating array contents by MynameisAchint

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