Tim Barrus Blog
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The Drive to the HIV Clinic Far, Far Away
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He usually falls asleep on the way there. I encourage this so I don’t have to listen to all the fear and paranoia. I have my own paranoia.
“We’re here.”
“I don’t want to go in there. Look, there are cops at the door.”
There were cops at the door…
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My Response To The Readers Challenging Me At The New York Times
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Readers pose the question: Where does one begin.
It transcends democracy. I live out of one bag. A camera bag (I am a photographer who also works with adolescent boys with HIV). I teach the boys about memory which is what photography is. The teaching is neurologically based. How memory…
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My Appalachia
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cautionary bones/ we could climb the tree to get through your bedroom window/ even winter’s scalpel cold, and the fireplace was burning oak, and that warm scent would hibernate under your sheets and quilts like caves where your tongue inside my mouth was not unlike walking through the fields with…
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Where Your Eyes Were
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these openings, these candles in the eyes whose sockets saw desire, these and then forgiveness/ what you were was hunted down/ yielding in release, we smile in the dark knowing our names are not our names/ they are simply the names given to us, in rooms of loneliness, we would…
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Some Monsters Are Real
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Toilets of Appalachia
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the truck stop down the highway from the coal mine used to buzzsaw with the traction of the action/ today, it’s kinda like getting fucked in the ass in a graveyard/ the walls of the toilets are a literary subterfuge/ call joey has been dead for twenty years/ people still…
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Smash Street Takes Sex Ed on the Road
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The Smash Street Boys have created their own sex-ed class because they contend that adults give out too much misinformation, and they say adults think kids are too stupid to understand what is being left out. So they invented their own curriculum that is based on questions and dialogues all…
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The History of Getting Home
we were the boys who sat in the back of the class/ hoping against hope that no one would call on us/ bradon threw the football so hard that it hit bobby in the face and knocked him out/ we stood over him and kicked him to get up/
https://timbarrus.tumblr.com
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JUXSTAPOSITION
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adding context to the trade-off where the real plays off again, the unreal unreal/ you decide/ my job is not to decide for you/ i could, but that renders the photographs more mundane than i can tolerate/ especially when the mundane among you, the ordinary, who have buried any creativity…
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America is Toast: Tim Barrus, New York Times
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Americans are not living through a social crisis. America is dying – not living – through the demystification that has always been smokescreen for what America is actually all about, and always has been.
A violent, unequal, class system that denies class even exists. The only evidence that suggests class…