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Not Coming Home

Ose Casely

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Poetry

🎶 I’m coming home, coming home, tell the world that I’m coming home.
Let the rain wash away all the pain of yesterday.

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Trying to remember when the trees looked big.
We were boys, we’d sing in boxers off-key, off-pitch, off-tempo.
Didn’t matter to us, we were boys, we loved home.
When the final bell rings and screams fill the air

End of session – get naughty, no one cares.
Find all your good friends and bid farewell.
Your parents may be impatient, but they’re always there.

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Unfortunately, your story is not my story.
I actually remember when the trees were big.
When the boys sang in their boxers off-key—
Not me. I’d sing

🎶 I’d sing Sinatra, In the Wee Small Hours.
🎶 Celine Dion, All By Myself.
That concept I knew well, all too well.
But when the final bell rings, there’s one place I don’t want to be—
With people who don’t wait for me impatiently.

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Home.
Home is foul smell and smoky sky.
Home is language you can’t speak but understand.
Home is loud music, area boys drinking, always high.
Home is kpokpo garri, and usawe.
Home is starch and banga, home is red oil.
Home is song and dance—its rhythm you can’t forget.
Home is where everything makes sense, except…

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You.
Banging on the door that once welcomed you.
Open the door, are you okay? Open the door! Is there no way
That I could save you from the pain, this torment’s insane.

Mom!
Open the door.
I’ve seen the chaos, I’m built for this war.
The greys and the hues, the darkest shades of you.
They don’t upset me, in fact I’m immune.
Please open the door! Are you okay? What can I say, to make this all…

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Okay,
It’s been established, the past was painted blue.
The child has seen the future; he knows now what is true.
The boy wasn’t built for burden or for pain,
Nor did he deserve the tragedy, the labor in vain.
I am an adult now who doesn’t sing the song of coming home,
But chooses instead to deliberately create one –
A house of calm, of warmth, of sanity.
Maybe even a little vanity.
But one thing is for sure:
To that place, I shall not return.

Ose Casely

Ose Casely is a Nigerian writer and Visual storyteller whose work moves between poetry, film, short stories, and creative non-fiction. He writes with a keen eye for memory, silence, and the unspoken things that bind or break us. His poems and stories often return to themes of home, belonging, and the ache of becoming. Ose has written scripts for stage and screen, authored books such as Crown for Barrister and Kano the Hybrid City, and is currently working on his debut novel. He believes in the power of words to both bruise and heal, and his work seeks to do a little bit of both.

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Art Statement for “Not Coming Home”

“Not Coming Home” was born out of the layered contradictions of boyhood — revisiting the nostalgia of boarding school dorms, half naked children singing together with care in the world, and underneath it all, the refusal to return to the places that bruise us.

It is a poem about the quiet rebellions of youth, about choosing estrangement over submission, and about the way absence can sometimes feel like survival.

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