Part I

Home has different tastes on different tongues
— Pacella Chukwuma-Eke
Mine cuts across my feeling spread like a mat
and my weary worries disdained
I know home is the best refuge there is
where you’re free enough to be your normal self
but with uncredited hopes and wishes
you can be a hostage in your own house
by your own family
Maybe home is a house whose door is a sharp-toothed mouth
that swallows your joy and hopes
every night after a stressful day;
a monster that whispers into your dreams
with strange scary call-outs;
an endearing love that captures and blinds
all your flying visions
Maybe, just maybe, home isn’t after all a house
you can spend your night after the day’s work;
only to have your desired dreams
turned shredded nightmares
laughing at my bruised heart
or a place you’ve lived/are living your life
but a place you feel like yourself, supported
Home is an orange in an individual’s hand
with good and bad, sour and sweet,
fresh and rotten, or black and white taste
and I know it’s protecting me from being hurt
anytime it dips its fingers and rips the cloud
of my dream, and seizes its pieces
for it’s not good as one planned for me
Thanks for the love but I’ll love to have the pieces
of my dream than your whole planned dream;
it’s a personal conviction, abi?

Part II

When the pot home becomes flat
the boy knows home means hunger
Where do we feel loved most? Home,
right? Buy it could be smothering
It could be a poisoned spiced cake
Or a theatre where the eyes are operated on
to remove your vision so you’d see
things homely ways

If you ask the boy about home
he’ll tell you he prefers an accident
deliberate to cause memory loss
so he won’t remember home; and
be taken to a faraway home of his
until few days to death
But “home’s our umbilical cord”;
— Ayiyi Joel
and a way of calling us back

Even when I’m seven countries away
people still laugh at my reformed self
for shadow is the umbilical cord that tied me home
stretching across the seas riding the hills
swimming the forest all the way back home
for my shadow still harbours home deformity

If you’ll ask me, I’ll ask ‘which home’
where I’m born or where I’m happy
where I’m shaped or where I shape
where I’m myself or where I’m homeself
Even flowers have preferences of garden
and environment, regardless of the essentials
Cactus didn’t just choose the desert
It’s still home even if doesn’t feel homely
just not your home

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Bob Jenkin from Pexels