An Open Letter to Sona Patel, Director, Community, New York Times

Thank you for allowing me to comment at NYT. Comments done right are hot. This is, too, exactly the kind of comment I am apt to make in the comment section of the New York Times. I confuse your moderators. They are in good company. I am trying my best at I Am Focused on issues that are not cook books. I have lived my life in shadows. Shadows where there was no food. Only hunger. I lived on catching fish. Whose Tongue and Knives Dissolves their disguise of camouflage and loss and loss might weep, but settles on the face of gravity, the one you keep, pinned down and with him riding horses in the wild. The kind of horse I like to ride has been scheduled for the slaughterhouse where he will be killed. Give him one last go of it. One final ride. A large hook, suspended from the ceiling will disembowel him kicking and screaming. His guts slip onto the floor which is a river of every sadness the planet has ever known. The hook will lift him up and take him to be skinned. I said I would write about it because it has haunted me since the day I sneaked in there, and the getting out. Of it. Was hard. But not as hard as listening to the horses screams as we do our minutes, as we do our time inside this Come To Dust of Settled Spin. I cannot be there when he is disemboweled. Kicking and screaming. That is what I do, too. Kicking and screaming at the betrayal alone. Animals know where they are going. It is vile here. With everything pretty that is, marbled monuments and eclipses, I do this as revenge. My dogs against the cold. My blue fingers flying like piano keys played softly on a phone I have arrived to tell you that you do not know why you are here. That is what writing is to me. It’s rough. It means what it says. It is cleaned, starved, dangerous, fists, and oh, for a wounded horse with wings.

That is how I write because that is how I live. None of you guys at NYT knows what it is like to be poor. Or poor, and sick. Like me. Obviously, you are making money. You are not poor TODAY. And Today is changing fast it arrives on photons in a rain of them. It’s so easy and sometimes too delicious to pass up the opportunity to leave your past life in the dust.

What you guys need is a writer who can articulate what it means to be desperately poor. Poor now. Today. Not in the past with mom and dad and all the crippled sisters. It has to be someone who is not a suit. I am not that person. I used to wear a suit to work. I am in suit withdrawal. Being poor today is a fragile acid. They are always coming at me like lizards want to play, okay. Reader threats are ubiquitous. You, the reader, will be punished, too. I have been punished all my life. If I had it to do all over again, write those books, wading through the book wars and worms, would I do it. Again.

What, are you mad.

What I hear is a generic tone that creeps into the subconsciousness of the rules. The Harry Potter Libertarian Laws As Laid Out By Literary Jesus, it’s a lot like disease. No one knows when it will get you, but by god, it will get you, and lay you flat as only your dark eyes move around, you do not know why we are here we are here to get you to another emergency room where the chaos is twice the chaos as the first one we just left. We will wait. For Gadot. First, you need to tell the readers who Gadot is. As if. I knew. It’s also a lot like magazine format porn. Little boxes, little boxes. One infected person can spread a plague around faster than InstaUser InstaGenerated InstaContent can change its InstaSpots again. Fade to black. I am back to writing books. There is nothing Insta About It.

There will be comments. Here. There. Everywhere. And it all goes to tickytacky and it all looks just the same. That is not all it does. Comments will point you in a direction. This is a good thing. It could be a direction you do not for whatever twink reason those barflies in Memphis jumped dramatically from their bones. Someone is trying to tell you something. Thank you for allowing my work. It is different.

Tim Barrus