: How do you suggest in a poem that the narrator has dementia or a mental illness? How do you suggest in a poem that the narrator has dementia or a mental illness? I am thinking of using

Vote Up Vote Down

Well, if you think about it, forgetting means memories disappearing. So any metaphor involving things being lost or fading would work. Wind and water can both serve as metaphors for time. Dementia also means a loss of identity, so yes, broken mirrors fit.
Ideas:

Fog or darkness swallowing up representations of memories (like people or significant objects or places)
A fogged up mirror
A hall of mirrors, tricking the viewer at every corner
Waves washing away foot prints or images drawn in the sand
A fading photograph
A map or drawing soaked in liquid, slowly dissolving
Leaves being blown off a tree
Some kind of container with a hole, leaking its contents
A boat in a storm being torn lose from its anchoring and carried away
The ground crumbling under the narrator's feat, for example, near the edge of a cliff

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

are you trying to reveal the character with dementia as like a twist at the end, or do you want it to be in the beginning? Broken mirrors can have multiple meanings, so make sure to be direct, like including the words lost, forgetting, etc.

(0)