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

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

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

First Light

The bells will ring to claim a brand new sky,
And men will preach that luck is bought with gold.
They’ll say the way you start is how you’ll die,
A weary tale that’s long been over-sold.
But shadows do not haunt the year’s first cry,
Nor does the dusk dictate what days will hold.

Go find the work that makes the spirit tall,
And lean into the craft that you adore.
The world will try to make you hear its call,
But you must learn to shutter up the door.
If something seeks to break or make you small,
Then let it fall and find your side no more.

The soul is mended by the things we choose,
By quiet walks and whispers in the dark.
You have no debt to pay, no time to lose,
By chasing every faint and fleeting spark.
To save yourself is all the path you use,
Let joy become your only steady mark.

Happy 2026.

@doddyokelo

Monday, But Why ?

I am tired,
shrunken, chilled, and worn at the cuffs of my soul.
The night itself, a careless laundress,
folded me wrong and ironed in the creases of a bad mood.

My thoughts are heavy, they are a parade of strangers
wearing wet wool coats, stomping through the hallways of my mind.
And my intellect is bald, yes, but worse,
a barren, frozen tundra where not a single rebellious idea
has the audacity to sprout.

It is Monday.
the same old cracked vinyl of a gloomy chorus,
stuck, skipping, repeating the universal dullness.
My strength is a barometer at zero,
my motivation a phone on airplane mode.

This is the taste of it,
Monday, served on a cold porcelain plate.
Bitter at the edges, bland and beige in the middle,
a main course of immediate responsibilities.

But really,
why must Monday always show up like a guest who never takes the hint to leave?

@doddyokelo

AND YET, WE VOTE

WHO PROTECTS THE PEOPLE FROM THE POLICE ?

You may write us off,
dismiss us ,
ignore us in Parliament halls padded with stolen wealth,
but still, we see

We are the country beneath your motorcades,
the hands that build and break,
the voices cracking in the dust
because hope costs too much now.

And yet,
we vote.

We vote for thieves in clean suits

We vote for wolves draped in our flags,

Enough.

We are tired.
Tired of job descriptions reading “Must be connected.”
Tired of degrees gathering dust
while our dreams starve in silence.

We are tired of joblessness turned into weaponry,
young men hired cheap to kill our own voices,
paid to break bones they’ve never healed in their own lives.

Tired of watching peaceful protesters
shot dead,
while those who loot in daylight
are guarded like royalty.

Tired of asking:
“Who protects the people from the police?”

Tired of staged outrage,
press conferences filled with air,
and politicians who only remember their roots
when it’s time to lie again.

You fight for positions, not for people.
You dine with the devil,
then kneel in churches too small for your sins.

You debate your egos on live TV
as our people dig trenches
not for roads,
but for graves.

You die to be seen.
But we die because we’re ignored.

Kenya is choking.
On debt.
On lies.
On the stink of promises unkept.

We are not asking.
We are telling.

This time, we vote with memory.
With pain.
With names.
With tears that learned how to speak.

This time,
you will not scare us with teargas.
You will not buy us with t-shirts.
You will not distract us with empty tribal drums.

We will remember who was silent when we bled.
We will remember who smiled while we starved.
We will remember who disappeared our brothers
and called us TREASONOUS CRIMINALS.

We are not the children you once fooled.
We have grown teeth.
We have grown rage.
And we are coming.

So let the ballot tremble.
Let your seats shake.
Let the ground beneath your stolen homes shift.

Because next time,
we are not just voting.

We are reclaiming.

And if you still don’t listen,
then hear this:

We are not afraid.
We are not asleep.
We are not yours.
Not anymore.

@Okelododdychitchats

#RUTOMUSTGO #ENDPOLICEBRUTALITY #RAGEANDCOURAGE
#JUSTICEFORELIJOSHUA

To You, Tonight

You say you don’t read much.
But somehow, you always read me.
And maybe, without knowing,
You taught me how to bleed through the pen,
To shape silence into syllables,
To hold space for feeling,
Even when the world is loud.

So tonight,
As night settles in a robe of velvet quiet,
I write not to ask, nor to explain,
But to bless you, softly.

When the night folds her arms around the sky,
And the stars murmur lullabies in silver tongues,
May your burdens loosen,
May your spirit stretch.

For even the moon, full in her glow,
Knows the ache of holding light too long.

Rest, love.
Lay down the weight of unspoken things.
Let dreams drift in like gentle winds
Through the windows of your mind.

Don’t dwell,
Not on what didn’t grow,
Not on what wasn’t said.

Just sleep.
And let this be the lull in the poem of your life,
The stanza where you exhale.

Goodnight, beloved.
Goodnight.

@okelododdychitchats

When I fall in Love

When I fall in love,
there will be no trumpet,
no choir of angels rehearsing hallelujah,
just the quiet breaking of bread
between two hands that have known hunger.

I will not ask the sun to shine,
it will.
I will not beg the wind to be still
it will not.
But you,
you will laugh like sugar spilling from a jar
and I will remember
how joy can be messy
and still be beautiful.

When I fall in love,
I will not be the half of a whole,
I will be
the whole of a whole
meeting another
who does not need
completing,
only witnessing.

There will be no ticking clock,
no red thread prophecy,
no trembling knees
(unless from laughter).
I will not call it fate.
I will call it choice.
I will choose you.
And choose you again.
Even when your smile falters,
even when your breath
carries thunder.

I will not write sonnets.
I will write grocery lists
with your name at the bottom
underlined twice.
We will argue about soup.
And make up in whispers
like old songs
that only the two of us remember.

When I fall in love,
I will not promise forever.
But I will give you every now
I can carry.
I will plant soft yeses
in the soil of every day.
I will hold space
for your shadow
and your shine.

And when I say goodbye,
(if goodbye must come)
it will be with the ache
of one who has lived
and not regretted
a single soft, unspoken
I love you.

When I fall in love,
it will not be a fairy tale.
It will be
a revolution
of two
sacred, flawed,
magnificent
souls
saying,
yes, still.

And you,
you will not be worshipped.
You will be
seen.
And that, my love,
is holy enough.

@okelododdychitchats

It’ll Take all of Us

I walk the familiar paths,
their beauty dulled by the litter that lines them.
Plastic bottles, discarded wrappers,
a shoe missing its pair,
a trail of neglect that’s hard to ignore.
Why always here?
Why do we treat our home this way?

The roads are heavy with filth,
the air thick with fumes and frustration.
Bins stand idle, waiting for use,
while rivers, once full of life,
carry the weight of our waste.
Water, meant to be clear and pure,
now tells a different story, A very dark story.

I step carefully, dodging the trash.
An empty soda can here,
a torn newspaper dancing in the wind.
Is it so hard to care?
So hard to find a bin,
to think beyond the moment?

I search the faces around me,
hoping for answers, but find none.
Just more garbage, plastic bags snagged on trees,
cigarette butts crushed into the dirt,
fast food wrappers blowing like tumbleweeds.

It makes me sad,
not just for the streets,
but for the way we’ve let them become this way.
The beauty of Eastlands
hidden under piles of indifference.

I bend down,
pick up a piece of litter,
and toss it into a nearby bin.
It feels small, insignificant,
but it’s something.

I know it’ll take more than one person,
more than one act,
to fix this mess we’ve created.
It’ll take all of us,
a shared sense of responsibility,
to bring life back to these streets.

Still, I dream,
of rivers running clear,
of air free of smoke,
of roads where the only footprints
are those left by hopeful feet.

Until that dream becomes reality,
I’ll keep walking these paths,
beautiful but broken,
reminding myself that change
starts with me.

@okelododdychitchats

Golden Hue

My skin drips cocoa butter,
rich and unparalleled,
like the earth holding stories of rain and sun,
like a promise whispered by the night.
It’s dark and beautiful,
mysterious as a velvet sky laced with stars,
It tells a story of history.

It doesn’t glare or dull,
it balances like a seashell
cupped by moonlight,
a perfection gleaming in the sun,
catching light like a secret revealed.
This is my skin,
a story of generations,
a mark of resilience passed down with pride.

Its scent is Yara cologne,
layered and lingering,
a melody made tangible,
a fragrance infused with culture,
with memory, with home.
Every breath of it recalls
the places, the hands, the voices
that shaped me.

Above it rests a crown,
soft coils and curls that stretch toward the sky.
Hair that defies gravity yet welcomes touch,
a crown sculpted by no one but me,
alive in its strength, its freedom,
a hymn of self-love in every strand.

This essence of me,
is seen and felt
it’s carried,
it’s lived.
Every inch speaks
in a language only I can translate,
a declaration of identity,
a love letter to the self.

So let my skin drip cocoa butter,
let it shine unapologetically.
Let it sing of power and joy,
of beauty that doesn’t ask for permission.
This darkness isn’t a void, it’s fullness,
it’s richness, it’s light wrapped in shadow.

Let it carry the rhythm of culture,
the heartbeat of diversity.
In its depth is strength,
in its texture, truth.
It doesn’t hide,
it never will.
My skin drips cocoa butter,
and in it lies the whole world.

@okelododdychitchats