Sorry, I should have realized you meant static from the error. As you probably discovered, you can remove the dependency, but it will still try to link statically.
Tiny Core has few static libraries in order to keep the size down. You might have figured this out by now, but if you comment out line 90 in the Makefile.flags file before you run make:
LDLIBS += m crypt
you can build a statically-linked executable of 504K.