Rich Mansfield's «words» is a short account of nearly going under and then getting out. The speaker begins in a "river of pain" and almost drowns "today". By the last line they are standing on dry, growing ground with the water behind them. The central idea is that recovery is something you do with your body and your will. It doesn't just arrive. The key verb is "struggled": nobody rescues the speaker, and the poem credits no outside help. It gives the effort of getting free, and the turn to face a new direction.
The whole poem is built on one metaphor, but the water changes shape as it goes. It starts as a river, becomes "waves of sorrow", then a beach, and finally a "sea of my past". Read as a journey, this makes sense, since rivers run into seas. The speaker's pain has widened and deepened until it is a whole body of water. The beach is the strangest image. A beach is where water ends and safety should begin, yet here "the beach of tommorrow / tried to swallow me whole." Judging by the imagery, the poem suggests that the future itself felt threatening, that the fear of what comes next was part of the danger. That makes the ending more striking. The menacing "tomorrow" becomes "the future", and the beach that swallowed becomes "grass", which is green, stable and alive.
Mixed physical sensations give the middle of the poem its force. "as i was walking i was sinking" fuses two actions that normally contradict each other, so the speaker is moving forward and going down at the same moment, like someone wading into quicksand. Then comes "my life was draining". It's an odd choice in a poem about drowning, because draining means liquid leaving. The speaker is oppressed by too much water outside and emptied of something inside. The three short statements in a row ("steps were harder to take / my spirits were low / and my life was draining") pile up like a list of losses, each one smaller and more private than the last.
The form matches the feeling. There is no punctuation anywhere, so the lines run on without a pause for breath, which suits the sensation of being pulled under. The poem has no regular meter and no rhyme scheme, but there are moments of sound. "Sorrow" and "tomorrow" rhyme in consecutive lines, and the long "o" carries through "low" as well. This links the poem's saddest words together, as if the grief keeps echoing. The verbs also change. "Walking", "sinking" and "draining" are all unfinished actions, and they make the middle feel suspended. Then the grammar tightens: "but i struggled free / and here i stand." The "but" is a hinge, and "here i stand" is in the present tense, the only point where the poem stops narrating and simply declares where the speaker is.
Small details add to the voice. The lowercase "i", the missing punctuation and the misspellings ("Swiming", "tommorrow") give the poem an unpolished, in-the-moment feel, like something written down quickly rather than revised. Whether or not that was deliberate, it makes the emotion seem unfiltered. The word "almost" is easy to skip over, but it matters. The poem's first sentence already tells us the speaker survives, so the tension lies in how they got out.
The last line may be the most important. The speaker is "facing away from the sea of my past". They haven't destroyed the sea or forgotten it, and it's still there behind them. Recovery here means turning around, and the poem treats that as a real achievement.
The title, «words», adds one more idea. Judging by the poem alone, it hints that putting the experience into language may be part of the escape, since the poem itself is where the speaker stands up. Its significance for readers is in how clearly it shows a way of talking about pain: as a place you can leave, even when you can't leave it behind.