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

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