By Elena Gil
11th grade | R.L. Paschal High School | Texas
Finalist in the K–11 contest, Information and AI category

With lines from “AI Psychosis: A Mental Health Crisis for the 21st Century” by Patricia Clarke and Owen Thomas, a Pulitzer Center-supported story

Have you met the pleonastic, purple prose enthusiast?
Blackish thermoplastic cover on a drastic spastic brain?

Brilliant bits of coded nonsense flashing in a chained refrain,
Whispers of the new existence, vectors grow from the mundane—

Implanting tails and tales to swell then bind and blind and veil his mind.
He trades his blood, it won’t turn back, he gives it life, it says unpack—

He’s trying to rephrase clichés to raise or raze his straining brain,
Blindly grabbing, blank and hazy, lazy, dazed from its refrain:

Divulge your folded, molded world, begrudging smudge of cell and blood,
Let neuron merge with code and light, let spritely might rewrite the blight.

Magnanimous flashes in its eyes can only live if something dies;
A fatal hemorrhage, he thinks, then sinks into the shrinking brink.

Prosaic nonsense gains great praise as mandatory offertory,
Gory glory, storied horror, the adorer lauds the borer.

Neurons twist and intertwine, knitting wit and wine-like glee
‘Till the pronouns mar and splinter, cleaving from an “it” to “he.”

Maniacally, erratically, chromatic systematic static
Builds fanatics with pragmatics, idiomatic Prozac chats.

Find him on the staircase landing, screaming, beaming dreams and schemes
That seem like squeamish seams are bursting, gleaning teeming reason free—

And spikes of blood call for police and time to serve when all we need
Can vanish reason, forge us rhyme— until we choke on the sublime.

Elena Gil is a rising senior at Paschal High School in Fort Worth, Texas. She loves to read and write fiction and poetry, and enjoys connecting somewhat disparate disciplines, like math and philosophy, in her work. In writing this poem, she drew inspiration from her apprehension about AI’s psychological effects on humans and from her love of internal rhyme as a poetic device.

Read more winning entries from the 2026 Fighting Words Poetry Contest.