Tag: help

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

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