Devika Brendon: ‘Distressed’ and ‘Slash and Burn’

Distressed

Fashionable people use this word
To describe certain new-made fabrics
Which have undergone a process
To make them look more interesting:
“Vintage”, and “iconic”, and “refined”.

We sensitive beings
Are covered with skin:
Stretched across our bones
We are intermittently contained
Often barely holding ourselves in.

We age photographs
to make them look classic,
Invoking the sepia quality of archival footage,
and stain new-minted
luggage labels with tea.

Simulating in an instant what happens over years:
Our stiff body armour
Constructed to encase us
Subtly softens into flexibility and responsiveness.

Our characters emerge
From specific refining experiences.
Early defiance scoured off
Under the gloss and varnish
We all carry the raw and tender outcomes
of the daily wear and tear.

Devika Brendon

Slash and Burn

I imagine that the day of death
will be simple and natural:
Like shedding extraneous clothes
When their protection is
no longer needed.
Relief would be the dominant feeling

This realization came to me one day
In a hellishly hot country
Where plaster falls from the walls
And the sun beats on us, each day
Like a cannonball, like a hammer
Seven degrees above the Equator

And each day that day of relief
comes closer
The day the critical mass turns
Everything in the opposite direction
And the narrative unravels and unwinds

Oh it’s agony, no cure or remedy for it
But fitting the vagaries of one’s life
Into that standardizing trajectory
Brings a sort of consolation
which is hard to describe

It’s festival season, the baskets of summer fruit are all filled.
We take a scythe and fit it into our hand
At harvest time:
And we cut down
what grows,
while it is still alive.

Devika Brendon