Church

Take notes. Last Church Standing could be a book title. I live in the Blue Ridge. Our little towns all have a kinda strange housing market where $250,000 buys you one bedroom. I lived in a church once in Michigan. My bedroom was the balcony. It was a great place…

Tim Barrus: Blood in the Water

Sex was once considered to be a political act. Birth control was up for grabs, and birth control is still up for grabs. I remember – those times – when old white men called the shots because they could. The Supreme Court went for guns. Do you think, they won’t…

Tim Barrus: Sometimes I Go Back to Places I Have Lived

I see the places I have lived quite differently from when I was living there.

Tim Barrus, New York Times

I exist. You do not exist because you have no particular importance. I exist. I am a persom. You are a Homo sapien. One of many. Garden variety humanism. An ordinary communist. I ghost people every day. I get ghosted every day. Ghosts are the last men standing, they have…

Tim Barrus: Do People In A Lounge Lounge

Some Photographs Pull Me In

Even in some of my older photographs, if I look at them, they grab me – again – roughly, and I’m back again. With them. With them. https://timbarrus.tumblr.com

in a snow globe/

you cannot compare my life or the life i have lived and cherry pick it apart, and then stand back, and pretend you have accomplished anything/ i know exactly how bizarre it sounds to people i call the normals/ i am not sure anyone is truly normal, but i do…

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…

Memory’s Machine

the two of them could be silent as a blackboard/ i no longer know what it means to simply be/ their history is one of burning bones and whipped and a cigarette of fiery scars you cannot see/ who could do that to a child stop asking me that question…

your clandestine appearances

you are if nothing else. consistent. the modified us asked you to stop coming around and sucking out the ideas we have in our heads. leave us alone to do our art. but. no. your world is still, and clear. and. mean. there are some. precious things. you will never…

SomeNightsSlipping

pretending no one and nothingcan pull your puppet stringsyou, stumbling on bridges, you a moving target look at whathappened to us, the skygrew dark the skygrew light, the sky despite our farburning flame of delusionaldream palaces free of strings

To Burn the Sky

dusk was difficult to burn the sky we thieves together, and the lovers and the friends they all too often cum slowly such moments like distant moons and stuff and lawns can fade in suicide’s revenge so complicit with the living and their first violent year of holding you naked…

Having Lived With You

having lived with you/ for so many years, i kinda knew what it was you wanted/ what it was you liked/ in that orchestration of a silent language and other things tongues are for/ the darker planets of your delicious bed/ how sharply in it, your cistern just beyond those…

Running From the Past

stop pushing me my running from the past is mine your insistence that i not run from the past is abuse you are an abuser who relishes seeing people in pain and then you write about them and you spit in their mouths i don’t give a flying fuck if…

Another Remembering

Nous n’avons rien fait, mais à pied des plages intégralité de cette année. Même en hiver, nous étions à pied des plages. Vous dites que vous ne m’en souviens pas. Vous dites que cela n’est jamais arrivé. Je ne crois pas que vous ne m’en souviens pas. Qu’est-ce que vous…

You Will Never Understand

you were managing a mammoth, high impact portfolio mister big shot couldn’t shoot his cum unless he paid me to beat him up