landscape photography was a crutch for you/ it was never like, oh, someday you will actually be able to deal with people/ you were not a people person/ you were a i hate people person/ so the cabin we lived in was a

mess with your junk, with your photographs of rivers and trees/ and with me/

i had no idea anyone would ever see those pictures/ i was only a writer and what i wrote was mainly porn/

someone around here had to pay the rent, and there was that annoyance called food on the table/ i was just

the landscape to you/ my cock, my balls, my hole/ a rock, the mesa, a waterfalls/ i was safe/ you were the

one who was dangerous/ the porn sites who published those photographs you took of me were thrilled to do it/ he’s more than a writer,look at this/ the price of what i write did go up/ youwannapieceofme/

quid pro quo/

the rocks and the trees and the waterfalls never talked back/ they never asked you to hold them/ they never

insisted you had to leave the cabin today/ just for a few minutes/ i am not a tree/ i am not a rock you get to

climb/ i am not the spring grass/ i am not your sullen closed up shell of loneliness/ then, there’s the

darkness, too/ there’s above the black bulk of the eastern hills, and in the great bowl of the sky, far brighter

stars cold and blue as if carved from some paralysis affecting a vacuum swollen with a misery that might

have been sinking deeper year by year into a foul tangle, another secret life/ a strange wild thing like the

shadows of the ponies that run around the cottonwoods, scarfing up the ground/ the wilderness creeping up as if it were a seductive beast/

Tim Barrus