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Monday, December 9, 2019

Tom Snarsky - Five poems



Tom Snarsky is a special education math teacher at Malden High School in Malden, Massachusetts, USA. He is the author of Threshold, a chapbook of poems available from Another New Calligraphy. He lives in Chelsea, MA with his wife Kristi and their two cats, Niles and Daphne.



***
1 Untitled

Room for one tired, princely idea
to fold its wings, to participate
fully in free-market sleep like the
rings of rain around umbrella stands.

***
2 Poem without the letter “e” (starting right now)

It’s changing how I build my small raft
and float on it through living. It’s living
in our world as a bird, as though you
hadn’t thought of that. It’s a book shut
loudly upon finishing its last word, or
music that stops without any warning.

I’d call it what it is, but for now I must
call it duration, a fun mind trick to blur
our days into unity. Of all birds I know
your down is most, uh, fitting, or do I
want to say warm. I don’t know which,
and actually I don’t know if I think
it’s important to pick. I’m just thinking
until my small raft finally starts to sink.

***
3 Hammered Beautiful

Anytime I feel deeply
unsure, I return to a beach

surest place there is

Sorry. The trash collects
little pieces of being for

-given, which is easy

or easier than you’d think
to mistype as “fuck”

at least in the middle there

***
4 Survival by Danielle Collobert, translated (or not) by Norma Cole

Late Prynne helped, but only a little

I leaving voice without response

Like a rock in the belly of Montaigne

to articulate sometimes the words

A valve to shut the river water off

that silence response to other ear never

Death and deafness nothing common

if to muteness the world not a noise

Rapt in shared stillborn depress

sinks into the cosmos blue

Show me your arrow outward

no longer question that vertical trip

I say goodbye to the midnight forest

I leaving slide to the horizon

Start with our common lava and then

all equal all mortal from the I on

überschwemmt / Den stillen horizont

at full speed fleeing the horizon

The same Jackson C. Frank song

at last to hear only music in the cries

“I Want To Be Alone (Dialogue)” or

enough enough

“October”

exit

When I sing the same song over and over

to enter born on garbage hardly recognized the ground

Eine blasse Wäscherin / Wäscht zur Nachtzeit

emerged from salty slime the fetus come out of the drain

bleiche Tücher

solar plexus eaten away anguish diffusing lungs breath gasping



/



Silhouette the way the flowers wilt

squeezed the neck by the cord waking

Incidental throttled history red

trembling waking

Coming up here

burnt consumed bonze

Coming down with language

body break

“If I could just leave

out of touch caresses

My body for the night”

far from lips drank

Idea on the half-swell

memory of the body

And falcons

letting go present the instant survival

Where is my mother

without knowing on what to open

What happened to my family

the energy to the imaginary answered

The waking up and needing to scream

stutterings hardly at the rips

Smell of burnt olives

the cries from the edges of wounds not enough

Imagine every day felt like this

dove black into the bloodbath

A black burn glove torn off a scarred hand

to be worked the veins for words

It’s my mother, her song

I speech to open mouth open to say I see to whom

The clean and unstrange blade

swung to chaos weaponless

Fletching bright arrow forward into sun

will survive or not resistance to blows

Hammered beautiful

the long lasting life

***
5 The Lilac System

Do you know this song?
How the golden light at night
comes through the window
with no explanation,
not a wide enough view
to understand what must be
reflecting to cause that
glow on the water, like is it
skyline or streetlight?
How is it so consistent?