A competition asked for poems about mental health.
Hundreds of entries, presumably, covering depression, anxiety, grief and loss in all the expected ways. Mine won. I’m going to tell you exactly why I think it did, because the answer is a craft lesson worth keeping.
The poem is called “Notes from the Maelstrom.” Read it first, then we’ll take it apart.
Reality fractures like a mirror dropped from great height, Each shard a world unto itself, sharp-edged and treacherous. Thoughts spiral, a dizzying carousel of distortion, As the mind becomes a funhouse of horrors. Shadows whisper conspiracies, Their sibilant hisses a constant soundtrack. Walls breathe, pulsing with malevolent life, While the floor undulates, a sea of uncertainty. Time stretches and contracts, A rubber band snapping back on itself. Seconds become eternities, Years compressed into heartbeats. Faces morph, features melting and reforming, Loved ones transformed into strangers, into monsters. Trust evaporates like morning dew, Leaving behind a parched landscape of paranoia. Colors scream with impossible intensity, Assaulting senses already raw and overstimulated. Synesthesia paints sounds in violent hues, While tastes become visible, floating specters on the tongue. Logic crumbles, its foundations eroded By the acid rain of delusion. Cause and effect become a tangled web, Where every action triggers catastrophic consequences. In this maelstrom of perception, The self fragments, a kaleidoscope of personas. Which voice is real? Which thought authentic? Identity becomes a game of Russian roulette. And through it all, a sliver of awareness remains, A quiet observer watching the chaos unfold, Knowing that this too shall pass, But powerless to stem the tide of unreality. As sanity slowly reasserts its dominion, The world settles back into familiar patterns. But the memory of madness lingers, A specter waiting in the wings of consciousness, Ready for its next performance. Right. Now let's talk about what's actually happening here. The decision that won it Most mental health poems make the same mistake. They write about the experience from a safe distance. They describe what it looks like from outside the room. This poem refuses to do that. It puts the reader inside the breaking mind and makes them feel the disorientation directly. That's the central craft decision, and it determined everything else. Look at the opening: "Reality fractures like a mirror dropped from great height." That's not description. That's replication. The image itself is instantaneous, violent and irreversible, and your brain processes it the same way the subject experiences the fracture. One line, and you're already inside it. Judges reading competition entries in a stack develop a fast instinct for what's reaching versus what's landed. A poem that puts you somewhere in the first two lines has already done something most entries haven't. The architecture: stanza by stanza deterioration Each stanza takes a different sensory system and breaks it. That's the structural engine, and it's doing serious work. Stanza one: perception and thought. Stanza two: spatial reality. Stanza three: time. Stanza four: faces and trust. Stanza five: sound and taste. Stanza six: logic itself. By stanza seven, it's identity that goes. This isn't random. The poem moves from the external world inward. From what you see, to how you process time, to who you can trust, to what you can reason, to who you even are. That's a deliberate sequence and it mirrors how acute mental disturbance actually escalates. Whether the judges named it or not, they felt the architecture holding. The lines that did the most damage (in the good sense) "Walls breathe, pulsing with malevolent life, / While the floor undulates, a sea of uncertainty." This is sensory hallucination rendered precisely, without clinical distance. "Malevolent" is doing specific work there. Walls that breathe might be dreamlike. Walls that breathe with malevolent life are threatening. One word shifts the register from strange to terrifying. "Trust evaporates like morning dew, / Leaving behind a parched landscape of paranoia." The simile earns its place because of the contrast between morning dew (domestic, innocent, fleeting) and parched paranoia. The gap between those two images is where the emotional punch lives. "And through it all, a sliver of awareness remains, / A quiet observer watching the chaos unfold." This is the turn. And it's the line that separates the poem from being purely impressionistic to being about something real and human. That "sliver of awareness" is the part of the mind that hasn't gone under. The part that knows this is happening, can't stop it, and watches. That's a precise psychological observation, not a poetic flourish. Anyone who has experienced severe anxiety, dissociation or psychosis knows that witness-self. Naming it lands hard. The craft tools in play The poem uses extended metaphor throughout, but it doesn't lock itself to one. Each stanza introduces a fresh image system: funhouse mirrors, breathing walls, a rubber band, melting faces, acid rain. That variety keeps the reader from settling. Which is the point. You're not supposed to settle. You're supposed to feel what the subject feels. The verbs are doing heavy lifting: fractures, spiral, whisper, undulates, morphs, crumbles, fragments. Count them. Nearly every line has an active, slightly violent verb. That's what creates forward momentum in a poem with no narrative in the traditional sense. The one moment of formal questioning ("Which voice is real? Which thought authentic?") breaks the pattern of statement after statement. It signals the moment the speaker loses their grip on self. Questions in poems almost always signal a turn or a crisis. Used once, they hit hard. Used five times, they become a habit. The ending as craft decision "But the memory of madness lingers, / A specter waiting in the wings of consciousness, / Ready for its next performance." The final image is theatrical: wings, performance. That's deliberate tonal choice. It pulls back slightly from the intensity and frames the whole experience as something that repeats, that waits, that has its own agency. The word "performance" carries a double weight. There's dark comedy in it. Mental illness as performer, waiting in the wings for its cue. It's not a healing ending. The poem doesn't pretend recovery is clean. Judges in mental health competitions tend to distrust easy resolution. A poem that ends with "but I found the light" is usually lying. This one doesn't. That honesty is a craft choice too. What you can take from this Pick any experience that involves altered perception, and try writing it from inside the experience rather than describing it from outside. The rule is simple: the reader should feel it, not observe it. One exercise worth trying: write a four-line stanza where one sensory system has gone wrong. Not "I was scared." Show the room misbehaving. Show what the body perceives. See if you can make the reader's own perception shift slightly, just for a moment. That's the job.