If you can keep your head when all about you
  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
  But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
  Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated don’t give way to hating,
  And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
  If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
  And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
  Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
  And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
  And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
  And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
  To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
  Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
  Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
  If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
  With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
  And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

you walked through the fire
& lived to tell the tale—
but now,
the smoke
still clings to your lungs,
& every breath feels
like a battle
you never asked to fight.

Heartbreak is not sudden, not swift,
no clean cut, no mercy of final breath,
just a slow unraveling,
a body left breathing when the soul has fled.

The air turns to tar in my lungs,
each breath a memory I can’t exhale.
My ribs are a coffin for the love we buried,
but it still whispers beneath the wood.

The sun keeps rising, indifferent,
mocking my sleepless nights,
and time, that cruel undertaker,
refuses to lay me to rest.

Hunger comes, but I let it pass,
an empty stomach suits an empty heart.
Food turns to dust on my tongue,
nothing tastes like it used to.

I walk among the living, unseen,
a ghost with no death to grieve,
a heart still beating in a hollow chest,
wishing for silence, but cursed to bleed.