Poetry by Beldina Odenyo

                Paul Sableman CC




Plates


In my childhood home.
We threw a lot of plates.
A lot of very nice, to regrettable crockery was sacrificed, dashed off the patio by my sisters hands, my fathers hands, my stepmothers hands and eventually mine.

We, well one of us, would run out of words or be desperate for our pain and purpose to be understood through the destruction of dishes.

My sister, arms laden, stomping from kitchen tile to mossy concrete to begin the ritual, the display.
Shards of plate flying out and often into the grass for bare feet to discover later.
Each clatter punctuated and precursed with a “fucking (release) CUNT!! (smash)”. 
Till each plate was done.
My father, more a singular man would puff with one solitary plate cursing in Swahili with a twang of Scots till he reached his zenith and hurl it far out of sight but always audible in its fragmenting.
My stepmother liked to begin by holding court at the kitchen table, clutching a mug from a bird sanctuary to within an ballhair of its life and when you thought that it may shatter arise would her boiled blood and body to turn to the crockery cupboard. She always chose the shittest plate. 

I, in awe of my sisters mastery of her rage chose the laden route. As many plates as my arms could muster, audience or not. From tile to mossy concrete, I practised the ritual, finessing and funnelling my naturally quiet rage into a public, unneighbourly exhibition.

Depending on the severity of rage or potency of display we might indulge some bowls in the ritual. Convex of it in the palm of your hand. Perfect for a good fucking lobbing.
My sister would return with tiny white fragments in her hair. 
Fresh and flushed from her own hailstorm.
She always created her own weather. Her own atmospheric pressure.
The first born, conductress of a rogue orchestra. The plates perishable cymbals of each crescendo in our Grecian tragedy. Our rage ritual.

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​
WEDNESDAY 2ND DECEMBER 2020

Home.
This pen is almost depleted.
Like it's scribe it's a weird worn.
An urge to retire, retreat 
heavy tiredness pulls it near horizontal.
Everyone is feeling it. 
Worn. Wound. Unwound. Wilted. Wanton. Weary. Wronged. Wilful.
A new, internal gravity. Individual Artisinal Obeisance. 
Webbed in times secret suspension.
Held in liminal unknown intention.
Resile. 
Adapt.
Look for the finest facts you can find in this time of fine, tacit facts.
React.
Does flesh grow here? 
What is my weight in slow, suspended, redacted air?
What am I worth?
Where do I sell my wares?
Who sees me now and then
When is then?
Wake me up when its a really important when. 
You'll know when.
When the membrane of existence meets impossible divinity.
Wake me.
I only know it's Wednesday because the bins wake me up.
It's the bins day.
Cowp day.
Line up and shed your shite day.
When your waste is displaced and the guilt you feel for making it replaced with pride for the person that takes it away. 
It's good that they do that, eh.
For me. 
For us.
Imagine the mountain of fucking horror we would each chum around 
like a problematic pal better keeping close 
than ditching in a hole by the side of a road in your home county flying your tip and making everyone else live with it.
See it
the needless waste of it, the sudden taste of its former nourishment, the way it will soon just paste the landscape another amalgam of broken dams and council consensus civic damnation, a wilful wasteful that everyone could get a taste for if they weren't shamefully surviving, plodding and dying younger but trying to breathe powdered air womb-early, gratefully with the confusion of perpetual motion and peppered potential of ilk and kindlings, blood and firing
you never thought you'd be ditching souls and milligrams of control so shoddily in such hastily dug holes but here you are blackened nails, keening into and gouging earth for your former self, the one you weaved magic to move.
The waste.
The fucking waste.

​




THE DRINK        

I wont drink with you this evening
I wont drink with you tonight
Till the sun is casting shadows
in our minds and under eyes
You're a comfortable poison
warm my tongue and pacify
You only miss me when you're tipsy
I only want you when you when I'm high

I only want you when I'm low
I only want you when I'm a stranger to myself
I only need you when I feel unwanted
Broken, shameful, prison, vixen

If you see me at the bar
don't offer me a whisky or out for a smoke
there's no point in fishing here for hope
when we both deeply know

I only want you cause its wrong
I only want you cause it's easier than being strong
I only want you when I feel I'm nothing
broken, quiet, shameful, child






​THE LINE 17th Oct 2017

Dovetails
Days drawl and fade
Bones dry and ache
You stitch the face
and wear to be brave
to hold in the ceaseless mirror
lost in your own eyes
lulled in flesh, you know more
you've heard them in concert,
than you want others to know.  (or to tell the rest)**
Where did you learn to do that?
Who taught you how to move that way?
When life's running straight on
you're dancing sideways
Worn tales
you tell with your heart
The duty of DNA
the line at the start of the race
the rope at the end of the line
Where did you learn to do that?
Who taught you how to move that way?
Where did you learn to do that yourself?
Everyone's hiding
Why would you do the same?
Everyone's trembling
Be a solid renegade

​

Bel is a songwriter from the deep South of Scotland and far East of Africa.

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