After

It didn’t fall so much as it unfolded.
One minute, the sky was a familiar ceiling,
and the next, a bruise began to spread from the center out,
smothering the sun until the light felt thin,
brittle enough to snap between my fingers.

You don’t realize how much the light holds you up
until it’s gone.

Now, the air is thick with the soot of burned-out stars.
The iron draft of a closing door has changed everything,
it’s a predatory thing.
It’s in my bones now, pulling my shoulders toward the dirt,
turning my footsteps into heavy prayers that no one hears.
My knees have forgotten the habit of standing.

There is a cold, dense knot where my chest used to be,
a collapsed star, a private black hole
feeding on the scraps of my better days.
It doesn’t just take, it erases.
It has swallowed the before, the maybe, and the us,
leaving only this heavy, crippled silence
where my heart used to beat.

@doddyokelo

Still Home

Your touch was magical, a sudden and quiet healing
that reached through the skin to the very bone of me.
It was a gentle conjuring, a way of saying yes to the light
until my eyes danced with a glee I had long forgotten,
shining like smooth stones at the bottom of a clear, bright river.

Your look was intense, a steady fire that did not burn
but saw through the masks I wore for the world.
And oh, your talk, it was a pure water, a holy sound
that pulled me in like a song you’ve known since birth.
There was no struggle in the falling, I simply leaned
into the grace of you and found myself finally home.

But now the rooms are wide and the air is thin and still,
and I am singing the melody of a name I miss too much.
I am holding a place for you, built out of my own heart,
waiting for your footsteps to wake up the morning once more.
Come back to the warmth you started, come back soon,
for the joy in me is waiting for your hand to lead it out.

@doddyokelo

Let Me In

Your mind is a cathedral of locked doors,
where I walk the perimeter, tracing the cold stone,
listening for the silver resonance of a breath that sounds like my name.
I am an expert in the art of the unspoken,
gathering the crumbs of your glances like a hungry bird,
content to wait in the shadow of your mystery
until the daylight finally learns how to break through.

Expose the map of your pulse, the hidden place
where your armor thins and the genuine heart beats.
I do not ask for a tour, I ask for the keys to the foundation,
to be the protagonist in the story you tell yourself at midnight.
Let me inhabit the space of your firsts,
as the very oxygen that fills your lungs
before the world taught you how to hesitate.

I can feel your love like a subterranean river,
heavy and gold, moving where the marrow dreams of light.
But I am drowning in the shallows of your caution,
wondering if you will ever let that river break the banks.
I love you with the violence of a sun that never sets,
I am waiting to see if you will finally surrender to the same
beautiful, terrifying gravity that holds me to you.

@doddyokelo

Home, At Last

I have waited on the trembling edge of distance,
breathing weeks and swallowing whole years,
until the heavy harvest of my wanting
ripened like a fruit too heavy not to fall.

And when the hour comes,
when your hands, sure as riverstones, find the fold of my waist,
I will know I am home.

We will not rush.
Love will come slow, with a dignity earned,
with the lull of thunder gathering before it speaks.
Your heartbeat will answer mine
in a language I never had to learn,
for it lives inside the marrow
of who I am.

Then, quiet as morning,
a circle of silver will claim its place,
cool and certain,
like a moon descending into my palm.
I will stand taller beneath its gleam,
knowing I am chosen,
and choosing in return.

We will walk the shoreline,
where the wind bows its head
and the sea offers its salt as blessing.
Our shadows, two once searching,
now one wide image,
will stretch across the world’s rim,
writing scripture in wet sand
that even the tide dare not erase.

For this is no faint drifting,
not the whim of waves or the vanity of chance.
This is gravity, baby,
a pull deep as the ocean floor,
a call older than the stars,
strong enough to shake bells inside my bones
and make them ring just for you.

And when morning breaks,
I will look into your eyes
and find sunrise waiting there.
I will hear my name on your tongue,
spoken like a promise.
I will know, finally know,
that forever was never far,
it lived in me
the moment I learned
to love you true.

@doddyokelo

After the Breath

The geometry of the bed is a lie, it holds only the shape of a departure.
I watched the light retreat from your skin, a slow tide pulling back
to expose the salt-crusted stones of a world without you.
There is a peculiar violence in a peaceful end,
the way the air refuses to shatter when the lungs stop their labor,
leaving me to inhabit the hollows you forgot to take with you.

God is a name I whispered into the hollow of your cooling throat,
not in prayer, but as a placeholder for the scream I held behind my teeth.
How strange to offer gratitude for the theft of one’s own heart,
to thank the North Wind for finally extinguishing the candle
simply because the wick had grown tired of the burning.
The mercy of death is a broken glass, it heals the wound by removing the limb.

Now the moors are just a distance to be crossed without a destination.
I am a weight dragging across a seafloor of soft, grey ash,
tethered to a ghost who has finally found her Shore.
The breathless war is over, what remains is the terrifying calm,
the realization that the horizon has folded its wings
and I am the only thing left moving in a landscape turned to stone.

@doddyokelo

Broken

The cruelest wound 2026 has seared
is the silence where your voice belongs.
You posted just yesterday that you’d overcome,
and I believed you with every fiber of my being.
You always rose when life tried to break you,
I never imagined this fall would be the last.

Why now, while our shared dreams still wait for us?
I was so certain of our next meeting.
But grief is my shadow now.
It is a heavy, unbearable thing to watch
the boys I grew up with become
stories cut short before the ink could dry.
We were built from the same soil,
we learned the world together, fought its battles together.

Awuoro Thoo! My heart finds no softer word for this.
The last time, you said you were okay,
or at least, you looked okay.
And when you said you’d overcome,
I held enough faith for the both of us.
Now, your absence sits like lead in the room,
and the waves of loss keep crashing in.

My heart bleeds, I am shattered.

Rest well, Wuod Ombija.

@doddyokelo

I Finally Understood.

You took five years
and slit its throat without a pulse of regret,
a neat execution of history.
Then you stood on top of the ruin
pointing at me,
pretending the blood was mine to answer for
when your hands were still wet from the work.

You wanted miracles
from a man wrestling rent every month,
3,500 shillings dragging their feet.
You wanted a Mercedes Benz
from a man still begging breath from broken mornings.
I gave what I couldn’t afford,
pockets stuffed with dues to God,
a wallet running on fumes and delusion.
But somehow you demanded
Paris dreams from a pocket-of-poverty stricken reality.

Still, I loved you
like a vigil in the dark.
I took you out in a mall with what I could raise,
bought you a gift I imagined your skin would claim,
yet it gathers dust where you dropped it.
And when you said the gesture was useless,
I finally understood,
you meant me.

@doddyokelo

Happy Birthday, Dear One.

You were the weight that kept me grounded
when the world felt made of iron and salt.
Not just a witness to my seasons,
but a companion through the thickest briars,
staying close with a quiet, stubborn loyalty
that still feels like a minor miracle.

A heart such as yours
cannot be measured in common coin.
I wish for you a life that mirrors your own depth,
a vitality that throbs like the solstice sun,
the ease of a long-shadowed afternoon,
and a heart that never knows a drought.

On this day of your beginning,
and through all the chapters you’re yet to write,
may you see yourself through the eyes of those you’ve helped.
You are rooted in our stories now,
the name we say when we talk about home,
a presence that stays long after the lights go out.

Happy Birthday, Dear One.

@doddyokelo

Give Me Time

Give me time,
hold the reins soft in your hands.
I’m moulding a future from raw clay,
shaping it with my own hands,
climbing a hill I never stop sliding from.

Be patient with me.
I am giving the last of my breath to build more breath,
praying into the night with worn hope,
waiting for heaven to write back.

God will answer,
I feel it burning somewhere just beyond reach.
But pressure?
Pressure will crush the promise before it flowers.
It will sour the love we planted,
bruise it until it tastes like curse instead of blessing.

Don’t turn your eyes toward the neon world,
the staged lives and filtered fantasies.
You know we feast from little,
yet I still stretch it into something sweeter
so you can glimpse the life I swear I’m carving for us.

But if you make my ribs your stepping stones,
if you demand the world today,
I might not survive to see tomorrow.

I don’t want to die young.
I need silence, space, and peace,
not to escape you,
but to return with enough abundance
to lift us both
into the life that waits.

So hold me gently,
walk beside me,
and one day,
we’ll rise together.

@doddyokelo

He Spends the Gold of Her

She is beautiful, yes,
but beauty grows fangs in the dark.
She tells you she’s out with a friend,
yet her truth is curled on another man’s chest,
his heartbeat pounding, the thud of wanting,
a sound you were never allowed to hear.

His fingers roam through her hair,
slow, sure,
mapping a tenderness she once withheld.
She loves it,
the salt of his sweat,
the wild brush of his chest hair,
the animal warmth that keeps her there.

She is not busy, brother.
She is not home.
She is answering a call
you were never invited to,
the quiet work of sheets and bodies
moving without guilt.

Her phone isn’t dead,
your name is.
Blocked.
So silent you can hear your own hope collapsing.

The things she hoarded from you,
laughter, softness, time,
fall easily into his open hands.
She gives him the light she swore she never had.

Rise from the wreckage,
rebuild the kingdom of yourself.
Leave her ghost behind
and grow into your better name.

There is life beyond this wound.
And love, real love,
will meet you where you stand,
yours to keep.

@doddyokelo