Nobody in this poem dies on camera. The speaker begins by admitting he has "never seen anyone take their last breath," which is a strange confession for a poem about death. What he has seen is the aftermath, and the poem insists that this is enough to hollow a person out. "Toe to toe" borrows the language of a boxing match, and a line later the toe tag appears, a small administrative label attached to every body. The echo of "toe" is quiet but effective. Death here is both a fight and a routine, and the routine is what wears him down: "with every new toe tag my humanity fell."
That verb, "fell," is the poem's spine. Humanity falls, emotions "fall into a well," and finally the "comrades that fell" return in the penultimate line. The word links his private collapse to the deaths of others, as if what happened to him and what happened to them were two versions of the same event. It also gives the closing word, "Hell," a hint of the Fall, a descent with no one to blame and no obvious way back up. Judging by the imagery, the speaker's work involved bodies, loss and fellow workers or soldiers, but the poem never names the job. It stays with the effect rather than the cause.
The well is the central image, and the poem handles it carefully. It is "empty without pain, sorry or grief," so what he has lost is the capacity to feel, not just the capacity to hurt. The next line widens the damage: he is numb to "others pains, happy or positive beliefs." Joy has drained away along with sorrow. The line is overlong and clumsy, and that suits it. It reads like someone trying to list everything that has gone missing and running out of breath.
The form is loose but not careless. There are thirteen long, speech-like lines with no steady meter, closer to a confession said aloud than to a crafted stanza. Rhyme keeps pulling them into couplets: breath and death, fell and well, then fell and Hell at the end, which closes a circle. The most interesting rhyme is "me" and "PTSD." A clinical acronym lands where a lyrical word would normally sit, and the sound makes the diagnosis feel like a verdict. Just before it, "Trauma, tragedy and memories" stacks up hard *t* sounds, and the word "curse" turns a medical condition into something older and darker. The unpolished edges, such as missing apostrophes, "sorry" where we might expect "sorrow," and "You tubes," give the poem a raw, unedited feel. It reads as a statement made before it could be tidied.
The middle of the poem is its flattest, and deliberately so. "My medications mask it and it helps to an extent" is plain, almost tired, with the *m* sounds repeating like a pill bottle rattling. Then comes the one place where the emptiness is contradicted. He plays videos that "make me cry," calling it his way "to download and vent." The computer verb is revealing. He treats his grief like data piling up in a device that needs clearing. Yet the fact that he can cry at all undercuts the earlier claim that the well is empty. The numbness is real but not total, and the poem quietly shows him finding the cracks in it. Notice, too, that "extent" and "vent" rhyme around the crying line, so the rhyme frames the tears, as if the form itself were holding him together.
The ending refuses both self-pity and glory. "My heart still goes out to all my comrades that fell" is a surprise after all that numbness, because the heart turns out to be working. Then he says he "would do the same job again," and the word "job" is deliberately ordinary, with no flags or speeches. The final line ends not with a full stop but with an ellipsis, so "Hell" is left hanging. Nothing is resolved. He holds loyalty and damage together and does not ask the reader to choose between them.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It is a first-person account that names PTSD, medication and private coping without decoration, and it shows how someone can regret nothing and still be wounded. Its roughness is part of its honesty.