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 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

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

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