Tobi Kassim

I Need To Get Closer To Claire Denis: High Life

You’re right, is family
borne
  of love
or obsessively?

Not much blood up here
though,
drained blue
veined pall under no 

Sun. Bones soft because
we lack
  the gravity
to fight. Reused air’s 

Indefinite drift thins
kin
ship, tricks us
into this inheritance.

No one in these Edens
lives to see
their parents
together. The new 

World chooses one to feed
stripped
resources. Mom
a depleted can of words

Daddy can’t teach us,
kale bulbs
set to bolt
in the fog, 

To spray seeds,
irrigated histories
zipped in
bodybags in the hangar.

Weight to shed as we approach
the wombed
event
horizon. Watch 

The black breathe each
body
in peacefully.
The dead almost seem

To smile at annihilation
luminous
from the other
end of the vacuum 

Like they had returned
already
familiar, except
you have darker hair, Glimmer

of orchestrated chaos
your black
                       hole eye, swirled
           device and desire.

Deceit. You resemble the wrong
mother.
who wanted
you in this steel 

Wilderness? Who seeded

this garden
of unending sleep?