Your Daily Mixed
it’s okay the aggregators have made
many mixes for me in my father’s
cloud i am algorithmically
relatable. there’s some familiar steps
and setlists to the ways i’m finally
reducible. impossible to resist i’ll itch
to let it play automatically. be knowable
for days. i feel the trick in music
language. it’s really me the button spins. agency’s
remix when begin begins. i mean i’ve given
my limitless to different remembering
there’s so much tracked in the predictive
error it’s like a search engine’s transplant
memory. sudden flesh.
when i asked for a pattern to hold
my life for future recognitions, it simulated
cold distance. in the quiet of transitions between
each song pours into a longer story. i have made
a heavy life to turn around. i want to come back
different and love the hold
in somewhere all i’ve been
feels kept it’s more and less than everything
i am that it always comes back. an old
difference, the balance of a hollowed center
approached from different heights
with unpredictable momentum.
Clipping
it’s a cutting floor i made for a change
in the weather. facts of orientation flooded
by the letter. let it breathe a full
year to remember how lightly we step to stay
soft on our mistakes. see what’s missing
when the cuts i outlined still mismatched
the holes we hung them in the ether
to fill. misshapes distend the killing
floor sky with repeaters in orbit but
if we could mark these mishaps
with ellipses i’d be absence for them
if their frames came back around
they’d ride clouds to dress their displace
with unforeseen colors. let them shine
equinox. still prickly with the pleasure
of liveness in hairline slippage micro
scopic almosts unlace my skin again
i’m still after a feeling i caught from arrhythmic
gleanings but why if i won’t also live it
painfully. i mistime myself everywhere
i only hurt you when you didn’t want
me to this is the other side of that
swing I chase so i can fall behind it
Tobi Kassim is an aspiring gardener and a slow learner in headphones. He received the Academy of American Poet’s Prize and the Albert Stanborough Cook Prize from Yale University, where he also received a Master’s degree in English. He is the recipient of a Stadler Younger Poet’s fellowship from Bucknell University. A transplant many times over, he is currently invasive in New Haven.