"Through tough and good times" sounds like the language of a promise, the sort of thing people say when they are sure of each other. Sinethemba Mnukwa opens "Define the Odds" with that phrase in quotation marks, but pushes it back with "he said, / Years back," so it is already hollow. The promise belongs to the past, and the poem is about what remains. Love, once his "meditation," a practice of calm attention, is now "the medication he's running from." Only one letter separates those two words, and this sound-play is the poem's sharpest idea. Devotion and treatment look almost identical on the page, yet one is chosen and the other endured. Judging by the image, even the remedy for his hurt feels unwelcome to him.
The poem has no rhyme and no steady rhythm. It is free verse, and its stanzas break unevenly: an opening tercet, then single lines left floating alone. The white space works like held breath. "In the world of the loving and living," ends on a comma and never finds a verb, so the sentence hangs. "Gigantic odds with similar limitations" is also a fragment. The vocabulary here turns abstract and official, with words like "odds," "limitations" and "experienced." "All these describe the type of heartbreak he experienced" sounds like a line from a case file. Third person adds to the distance. The poem seems unable to speak about the pain directly, so it reaches for the language of reports.
The body, by contrast, gets the language of horror. He is "a monster in his own body," then "a dead person walking, a zombie." The three images pile up, each restating the last, as if the first never quite said enough. "Zombie" arrives as a flat label after a comma, which makes it feel more tired than frightening. His own body becomes somewhere he no longer lives comfortably. These are creatures of the night, and the next lines put him there: "awake at night, / Insomnia playing the part, just alive." Insomnia is almost personified as an actor taking a role, and the small word "just" shrinks his existence to the bare minimum.
Then comes a defensive turn. "Never at all did he think of death, / He knew what his purpose was." The slightly formal phrasing, with its inverted "Never at all did he think," reads like an answer to a question someone has asked him. Next, "blinded by love" is a worn-out phrase, but the poem sharpens it with "Four letters that turned him into a sadist." Refusing to say the word, and instead counting its letters, shrinks love to something small that has nonetheless done enormous damage. "Sadist" is an odd choice. It suggests cruelty, though the poem never says toward whom. I read it as possibly cruelty turned inward, but that is an inference. What matters is that the word contains "sad," and the next line denies it: "He wasn't sad."
The final line, "He was trying to define the odds to those who never seemed to understand," is the longest in the poem. After so many clipped fragments, the sentence finally runs on, and the length feels like the effort of explaining. The title is an instruction, but the poem never actually defines the odds. It shows only the attempt, and the people listening still don't follow.
That is where its significance lies. The poem pushes against the assumption that heartbreak simply means sadness, and it shows how hard it is to translate private damage into words others will accept. It does this through the unresolved sentences and the clinical language that sits so awkwardly beside the zombie and the monster. The meditation-and-medication pun carries the whole story in one letter. A reader may not agree on what exactly the odds are, but the poem makes clear why he struggles to say.