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

Let Me Go

I’ve been watching the clock face more than yours lately,
Checking the signal on a glass screen that stays dark.
You say you’re busy, and I suppose that’s a kind of truth,
But busyness is often just a wall we build
Stone by heavy stone, to keep the neighbors out.
I’m standing on the far side of that wall now,
Listening for a footfall that never seems to come.

It’s the silence that does the hardest labor,
It sows a crop of doubts in the fields I thought were cleared.
When you don’t answer, or you answer three days late,
The words feel like an afterthought, a cold crumb
Thrown to a bird that’s forgotten how to fly away.

If the fire has gone to ash, don’t stir the coals.
There’s no use in pretending the room is still warm
Just because we’re both still standing in the dark.
Go on and say it. Unlatch the gate and let me go.
A clean break is like a sharp frost in late autumn,
It kills the garden, yes, but it saves us the long misery
Of watching the leaves turn yellow and rot upon the vine.

@doddyokelo

The Measure of You

I may want to say I love you,
But how does one measure love,
In syllables, or in the tremor of a soul that stumbles at your smile?
Your beauty disarms language, turns words into stardust,
And I, a poet, become a beggar before your glow.

I may want to confess how you make me feel whole,
Yet “whole” feels too small, too mortal,
For you mend things I never knew were broken.
You walk past, and even the wind forgets its direction,
Even time takes a pause, to stare.

I may want to spend all my hours with you,
But what story shall I tell when the universe listens in envy?
Shall I speak of how your laughter baptizes the air,
Or how your eyes hold constellations of dreams that the stars bow to?
Even metaphors kneel when you pass.

You, my dear, are not within the normal SI unit of beauty,
You are the measurement that broke the scale.
The scientists may try to name your glow,
But it is art, not arithmetic; melody, not reason.
You are the kind of beauty that poets chase and never catch.

@doddyokelo

Man Enough to Cry

I know, I’m a man, yes, the great pillar of might and muscle,
The one who never trembles, never falters, never feels.
Society’s favorite statue, polished, silent, hollow.
But save that sermon, really, keep your “men don’t cry” gospel.
I am human, not granite shaped for your comfort, I bleed too, I just hide it better.

Oh, how noble it must look, dying quietly inside,
Smiling wide with a cracked soul, calling it strength.
You call it “African masculinity,” I call it emotional suicide.
I can’t drink your bravery forever, it burns going down.
Sometimes I just want to exhale without the label “weak,” without the world mistaking honesty for failure.

Let me speak, even if my words leak salt and sorrow.
Don’t hand me depression and call it dignity.
If tears offend your tradition, good, let them flood it.
I’d rather drown honest than live pretending I’m steel.
After all, even lions cry, you just don’t stay long enough to hear it roar in pain.

@doddyokelo

How It Feels To Be Home

I am afraid,of the dark that breathes and shifts,
It bends and folds around the corners of my mind,
Where unseen eyes wait in shadowed silence,
And whispers crawl like wind through broken glass.
The night becomes a mouth, open and waiting,
And I am its trembling sound, half-alive, half-lost,
Reaching out for the sound of your name,
To anchor me where the light once stayed.

I see them, those figures born of fear’s design,
They lean against the walls like memories uninvited,
Their outlines blur in the dim, uncertain air,
And I cannot tell if they move or merely breathe.
They haunt the corners of my sight like regret,
Soft, cruel, and patient in their waiting,
Till your voice, gentle as dawn, loosens the dark,
And the room remembers how to breathe again.

I hear them too, the voices that hiss and murmur,
They tell me of endings that never began,
Of love that rusts beneath the weight of time.
They are not real, I tell myself, they are smoke,
Yet they know the cracks in my courage by name,
They slip through the seams of my silence,
Till your presence returns, steady and golden,
And their cruel chorus falls to dust.

Without you, fear builds its kingdom in my chest,
A fortress of shadows and unanswered prayers,
But when you come, the darkness loses its teeth.
You are the dawn that rinses the night of its grief,
The calm after thunder, the stillness after rain.
You make the corners smooth again,
And I, once a ghost in my own house,
Find my pulse, steady and sure, in your light.

So come, my calm, my gentle resurrection,
Wrap your warmth around this frightened skin,
Hold me like a promise you mean to keep,
Till the dark forgets my name,
Till every whisper learns to fade,
Till the moon watches us without envy,
And the stars sing softly of peace.

Walk with me, down these hollow streets of thought,
Where my footsteps answer old fears,
Let your hand fit mine like sunlight fits morning,
Let our shadows melt into one.
For with you, the night forgets its hunger,
And even silence dares to dream again.

Come, fill this hollow where my heart once broke,
Plant your laughter in the cracks of my chest,
Let love grow where fear once built walls,
Let your light spill over my broken fields.
With you, every barren thing learns to bloom again,
The air tastes of spring, and I remember,
How it feels to be unafraid,
How it feels to be home.

So come, be my light, my refuge, my calm,
Walk with me until the dark forgets its way,
Hold me till the world grows quiet and kind.
For when you are here, the night stands still,
And even my ghosts bow in surrender,
For they, too, know your name means dawn.

@doddyokelo