My Mother’s Son

I learned the way a man should stand and walk
From my mother, whose lowly, luminous hand
Guided the flame and kept the bitter draft out.
She taught me strength is not a frozen thing,
But something fluid, like a mountain brook
That yields to stones yet finds its own deep way.

So if I seem a trifle soft to you,
Or if my eyes should cloud and spill a tear,
Know that I’m built of different wood and sap.
I do not fit the narrow, leather shoes
The world has cobbled for a generic foot,
They pinch the heel and bruise the natural step
Of a man who’d rather walk a grassy path.

One may be pressed to edges, sharp and cold,
To please a neighbor’s sense of how things look,
But there’s a boundary where the self begins,
A stone wall built of choices, not of spite.
I’ll stay within the garden I have grown,
Where fruit is sweet and every branch can bend.
Let me be just as I was meant to be,
I have no need to wear a stranger’s coat.

@doddyokelo

The Performance

The plastic turns to liquid under the lighter.
It is the only thing that speaks clearly to me.
A hot, heavy drop,
a sting that binds me to this earth
when my mind wants to surrender to a sky with no sun.
They call it pain.
I call it a reminder that I am still here.

I am an actor who has forgotten the script,
so I improvise.
I borrow a smile from the person next to me.
I mirror their laughter until it sounds real enough
to pass the inspection of friends.
“I am fine,” I say,
because the truth is too heavy to carry in public.

I do not know what happiness is.
I have seen it on others,
like a coat that doesn’t fit my shoulders.
I tell the joke, I wait for the reaction,
and then I whisper that I am kidding.
But I am not.
I am just a person standing in a room,
waiting for the fire to tell me I am alive.

@doddyokelo

Simply Hope

The sky pulls a charcoal blanket over its shoulders,
heavy and weeping.
From a great height, the rain descends,
turning the world into a place of hiding,
a place where we fold ourselves small
behind locked doors,
wishing to vanish with the light.

But the atmosphere is restless.
A sudden fracture of silver splits the grey,
and the silence is startled
by the loud, golden arrival of the sun.

It isn’t just light,
it is a prism breaking across the horizon,
the earth looking up and finally smiling back.
The air feels new,
charged with that sudden, sharp pain of romance,
the kind that arrives when you realized
you survived the storm.

We learn then,
watching the shadows dissolve into nothing,
that darkness is a poor tenant.
It has no permanent address here.
The light is the only thing
that knows its way home.

@doddyokelo

A Simple Faith

It begins as a fracture in the monolith of night,
not a flood, but a thin, insistent silver
widening the door.

We call it belief,
but it functions more like a spine,
the invisible architecture that holds us upright
when the gravity of the world
tries to pull us into the dust.

To trust the Unseen is to plant a garden
in the middle of a drought,
knowing the rain is already traveling
toward you from a horizon you cannot yet see.

It is the alchemy of the soul,
turning a desperate plea into a rooted hallelujah,
folding the abyss of a thousand whys
into the quietude of a single yes.

When the world loses its voice to the thunder,
faith provides the dialect of peace.
It is the power to stand amidst the ruins
and speak of the rising song yet to be built.

@doddyokelo

Mama

The world is wide and filled with borrowed things,
With pale stars losing heart and roads that end,
But you are the original, the source,
The porch light in the dark I first learned to love.
I find you in the breath between the chimes,
The tether of your hand upon the spinning world,
Turning the tremor of the crowd to song,
And making sense of all I cannot say.

Your name, Aleq
sounds like water over stone,
An ancient music in the blood.
You taught me that a heart is not a cage,
But a wide window looking toward the sun,
You gave me wings so I could learn to fly,
And held the string so I would not get lost
Among the stars or in the trackless forests.

To love a mother is to know the truth,
That grace is not a gift we ever earn,
But a long shadow cast by someone’s soul.
I stand within that light and find my way,
Carrying your strength like a hidden coin,
Wealthy in the ways that truly matter.
You are the anchor in the shifting tide,
The only compass I will ever need.

@doddyokelo

The Harvest of Your Ghost

Dad,
Did you have to lay your hammer down so soon,
And quit the road while mine was barely paved?
I never learned the true note of your voice,
Nor how your laughter caught the light of day.
I ask the wind, but the wind won’t talk to me.

They tell me that we move across the earth the same,
A heavy shoulder, a loose and measured swing,
An inherited grace that only blood can take.
They say the gap between my teeth is yours,
And that my eye for color,
Was a dye cast deep in the well of my bones.
I take their word, I search for the traces of you in the mirror.

Three years old is barely time to learn a face,
Much less the weight of wisdom or of flaws.
I still build a life of what-ifs in the dark,
What stories would you have pressed into my palms?
Which of your fires would you have wanted me to keep?
And what soft, breaking things would you have spared me?
Would we have stood as one against the dark,
A league against the world’s sharp edge?

This grief is a slow rust, it eats at the joints.
It settles in the wood time forgot to shape.
And god, it burns to know you stepped away
Just as the world began to hold its breath,
Before you taught me how to plant my feet
Or find the architecture of a man.

But here I am, I walk the line you drew,
Wearing half your face.
And I hope, as the seasons stack their weight,
You rest somewhere unburdened,
Knowing I am the harvest of your ghost.

@doddyokelo

A Peace I Cannot Take Yet

The world was a thief in a velvet cloak,
It took the bread, the wine, the light.
It turned to ash the words I spoke,
And left me shivering in the night.
I gave my gold, my grace, my years,
To hands that only learned to take,
Until the well of all my fears
Ran dry within an empty lake.

I do not fear the quiet dark,
The ending of the breath and bone,
I do not dread the final spark
That leaves the weary traveler prone.
The grave is but a silent bed,
A place where treachery must cease,
Where heavy hearts and aching heads
Are folded in a shroud of peace.

But oh, the faces at the door,
The ones who hold my tattered name.
I fear the shadow on their floor,
The snuffing of their candle flame.
For though the world has stripped me bare
And traded kindness for a stone,
Their love is all the breath and air
That I have ever truly known.

I stay for them. I bear the weight.
I walk the miles I cannot stand.
I bar the final, silent gate
With nothing but a trembling hand.
It isn’t death that makes me weep,
Or shadows where the spirits roam;
It’s knowing, if I fall to sleep,
I leave a broken house for home.

@doddyokelo

Just the Two of Us

I want to wake while the world is still gray
and see the sun start its fire in your eyes,
to watch the morning climb your throat
and spill across the bed like spilled honey,
sticky and warm and ours.
I want to witness the exact moment
the light claims you,
making a map of every curve I know by heart.

But the day is just the waiting room for the dark.
I want the hours when the house grows quiet,
when we peel back the noise of the street
and the heavy expectations of being men and women.
I want to slide into the night with you,
rib to rib, a slow collision of heat
until my pulse finds the measured thrum of yours
and stays there.

I want the salt of your skin against my tongue,
the scent of woodsmoke and wild things
clinging to the places where we touch.
I want to be so tangled in your limbs
that the blankets feel like a burden,
nothing between us but the fever
of two people trying to beat back the cold.

Let the world break itself outside the door.
In here, there is only the press of your weight,
the velvet friction of breath on breath,
and the long, slow sinking into sleep
where my skin forgets itself
and simply becomes a part of yours.

@doddyokelo

Walking for Nothing

The hunger has moved past the belly now.
It sits in the hands that have nothing to touch,
and in the eyes that track the sun
across a sky that offers no shade and no work.
I’ve walked the soles of my shoes thin
on roads that lead back to the same closed door.

She stands in the kitchen,
her judgment a cold draft under the door.
She sees the way I sit and calls it a choice,
thinking this weight is a slow rot of the spirit,
a laziness that grew where the ambition died.
She cannot see the mountain I am carrying
just to walk from the bed to the gate.

The plate stays clean because the pocket is dry,
and the throat is too tight for swallowing anyway.
It’s a heavy thing, to be a man of use
in a season that has no use for him.
The tools in the yard are losing their shine,
turning the color of dried blood in the rain,
waiting for a hand that isn’t shaking.

I am not sleeping when I close my eyes.
I am only trying to hold the world up,
bracing my back against a falling ceiling
that she thinks is just the empty air.
It is hard to plant a future
when you are buried in the present,
waiting for a wind that doesn’t blow against you.

@doddyokelo

What She Left Behind

The break wasn’t a sound, not really.
It was more the way a fence post gives way
after years of leaning into the wet wind,
a slow, settled surrender to the earth’s heavy pull that no one bothers to watch.

She left the gate swinging wide,
and I suppose that’s where the dust got in.
It’s the hollow of a fire gone out,
stark as a white stone in a dry sky,
unyielding as the granite we used to stack
to keep the field from the garden.

I went out today to check the timber.
The young trees are still bent from last year’s storm,
white ribs bowing over the black dirt,
refusing to stand straight even now that the air is still.
They’ve learned the shape of the weight they carried.

I thought of calling out to the woods,
but the woods are busy being trees.
And the heart, I’ve found, is much like a dry field,
it doesn’t actually shatter.
It just hardens until the plow can’t find a way in,
waiting for a rain that hasn’t promised to come.

There is a certain duty in the repair,
in picking up the stones she let fall.
But for now, I’ll just watch the sky turn the color of wet slate
and wonder if the deer know the difference
between a path and a boundary.

@doddyokelo