ferris wheel of rust

we were insomniacs who played on an abandoned ferris wheel whose pendulum in appalachian rain was one blind eye and sullen just like you and weary where your skin leaked raw and your bones in the dark were soup inside your nerves to be so high such as we were…

feeding the lion

it’s like feeding the lion the ferocity of bone/ there are no other beds for him to sleep in/ his brother’s cock is a hardening of the weight he carries in the gravitas of the secret whips he knows he cannot speak to or for or of/ thin-framed and the…

pacemakers and arrhythmia

i will never leave appalachia/ i know that/ it just is/ i do not love appalachia/ i do not know how to love a place/ i hold no romance for it to my naked breast/ the beauty of the blue ridge is more ruthless than you can know/ that soft,…

Ginger’s Pasture

when old ned died, we had to drag the horse’s body with a tractor to a pit i had spent a day digging/ i had loved that horse, and could not shake the feeling that we were hurting him by dragging his dead weight with a rope tied around his…

in these appalachian hills

in these appalachian hills groaning under not an anchor but a lack of them reading itself is like the scrap dealer bent so close to poverty one can only wonder why it is white people mainly cannot bring themselves to understand that reading is a warship that has kissed the…

house of gnomes

the gnome house in the distance sits on circumstance and bones/ the gnomes live there, in their passages through the earthen tunnels of the badgers and the bears/ whose fierce eyes and crawling dark against a sky that has disappeared/ like the hidden rooms smell of the kind of spitting…

One Trip To One Clinic

The CDC is developing new projects “to defeat AIDS once and for all” they claim. Not one of those programs is destined for Appalachia. Not one. We are left with a world of breathtaking indifference. We do not exist. We are not important. We can drive all day and all…

time in appalachia

time in appalachia defies gravity in the aftermath of silence/ you, mister night watchman/ the gulley is filled with old refrigerators/ even your lips were cold/ appalachia will blind you, boy/ the blue ridge lightning bugs are bone and yellow/ just like your forever eyes when your wings are gone/…

Name Me One Person

name me one person who could catch up to him allowing the thin rays of autumn’s sun, he can completely vanish and has slept late escorted into a dark pilgrimage of four years times ten and all the tin cups to it, appalachia boy rags and patches bony shoulders socks…

It’s just business

every sunday morning here in appalachiaville they take a head count to see who’s in church and who’s not in fucking church religion in america and what is so intricate so entangling as death you numberless infinities your mouths are filled with dust the absurd in the depth of winter…

MISHA, GO TO BED

Misha doesn’t sleep. We have that in common. I try my best to get stuff done when the house is quiet. Sleep for boys who have been raped and sexually exploited is a big bag of worms. Medical professionals in Public Health (which should be renamed Public Bullshit) never ask…

Tim Barrus Poetry

but what is poetry/ i have a small plot of land back in the big woods where i grow things/ secret things, things humming a little bit, sometimes in a thin minor key, humming impatiently in whispers that i have returned i have returned/ to sit here and write things,…

Wooden Porch Swing in the Distance

behind the house, and just beyond the little woods of oaks, there’s an ancient cemetery where the confederate dead are buried in their sackcloths/ six of us are buried in here, too/ civil war is just another vulture’s boots/ the cemetery itself is dead/ not unlike a darkened theatre, and…

GoBack2FuckingHellIAmAlreadyThere

Stick it in my mouth and cum. Then, pay me. My next door neighbor’s house lets winter seep into it like the grey February rain drains through the roof. Go back to where you came from. Hate itself is telling us about hatred in Trump’s America. I hate America. I…

Appalachian Savages and the Stigma

Stigma has its thick-skinned tongue licking out their fastidious shit holes it is a crisis it is a nonchalant devoutness it is inflamed, of consequence, provoked, quivering. Just stick me, God. I am usually far more interested in their reactions to stigma than I am in stigma itself. Run, as…

Tim Barrus: Jonah’s Mountain

I am amused and sustained by the idea that the end of homo sapiens’ domination of the planet will be sooner than anyone suspected. The end is irreversible now. It is too late. Many scientists know. They give voice to this reality in private. What good would blowing whistles do.…

Tim Barrus: The New York Times: Appalachia

http://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/opinion/appalachia-trump-coal.html?comments#permid=31085665 Appalachia. The nearest doctor who will treat us is a hundred miles away. Everyone I know is sick with something. Because we get such little and inferior medical care. The power company has released so much vile poison into the river, all the fish that we used to rely…

Tim Barrus: New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/opinion/christopher-hasson-extremism.html?comments#permid=30758363 I live in a small town in Appalachia. Hate is ordinary. It has a silence, too. A silence that says everything. A silence of indifference. The silence of ordinary people. My neighbors have always felt threatened. They listen intently to the hate in the media. The corporations – all…

Video: Blow It Up

AIDS IN APPALACHIA STILL KILLS PEOPLE

AIDS went off the radar screens. But it’s still there. Lurking in the background noise. It’s a demographic now. Whatever the fuck they want to say about it, AIDS is hard to miss in Appalachia. For those of us who live here, there’s little reality in the outstretched hand of…