"Poem" by Tom Snarsky

I felt like masturbating

I felt like crying

It was the twenty-first century

Already

A quarter over

There had been artistic movements

& wars

My debts had been repackaged

Countless times

The enemy of my enemy

Followed me

On Twitter, now called

Ex-Marines shot themselves in the head in their aunts’ basements

We lost touch almost as a whole

Category

We listened to music for evaluative purposes

Had to turn off Shostakovich a recording of quartet #10 that churned too fast like history

A choir with one boy who couldn’t sing

But tried to follow, quietly

Teachers like cigarettes fired or quit

My memory got so bad

I said the same thing a hundred times

Into the wax cylinder

Like the moon changing in the same ways

Like the water falling back to earth

The killdozer guy said it was like people couldn’t see

The 50-ton machine he was working on for a year and a half

Even though it sat there openly

In a shed, folks coming and going

“somehow their vision was clouded”

It was the twenty-first century

Eschatology

Minus clarity

All the new angels issued

Their wings & narcan

Doing their trainings from home

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Tom Snarsky called us from Berryville, VA.

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