Tim Barrus Blog
Posts tagged with poverty
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Tim Barrus, AppalachiaTown
Dogs in the back. They have my scent. Blow corndust at the dogs from your outstretched hand. Wiisssshhhhhhh.
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Tim Barrus, New York Times
People are crazy. Krazy Daisey dazed and confused as shit. I don’t read comments if they apply to me. I go off on people but I am swallowing my autistic Asperger’s Tongue They Might. I send this stuff out and there it goes into the Upper-Middle-Caste of the cast of…
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Tim Barrus: New York Times
Poverty is the sterility of survival.
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Tim Barrus, New York Times
For months, I was the one who fished all day in that small aluminum boat – bringing home the protein – fish, I was seven-years-old. Does that sound like – even a middle class – thing rich kids, any kids, kids with bling, kids with guns, something kids with laser…
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Butt Naked On a Bench
Tim Barrus, New York Times I am a communist. Democrats depend on luck. Republicans depend on hatred. Sometimes the bear gets you. You, America. You are powerless to keep your own children alive because you are hypnotized by all your stuff. Do not sink this boat. Why. Not. It was…
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How Does A Reader At The New York Times Get Away With Saying They Know Someone (me) They Have Never Met
I have a rule. Do not argue with readers at the New York Times. I get to break the rule because I made it. I just don’t recognize who they are talking about as if one thing came before the other so obviously there is some kind of undiscovered reason…
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Subway From Hell
It is strange. Watching grown men and women selling their souls. Many of them understand how poverty works. They are afraid it could mean them. It does mean them. The company you are working so hard for will be purchased by another company you are not working for. Then what.…
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TIM BARRUS, NEW YORK TIMES
I am a communist. In a world that condemns mostly accurate thumping of male chests, that communism was wrong. It was wrong. It cannot be turned around anymore. It’s for losers. I am a loser. Whose disappointment that anything can change, is the solid ground of If Only. If only…
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In the long Run, the Desert Will Win
Tim Barrus, New York Times I am a communist. I get graphs. Since I am poor, and live on $200.00 a month (I am writing this on a borrowed phone in a borrowed tent in pouring rain), I get the hatred. Of the poor. The rich have nothing to fear.…
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NYT Readers Respond
TomPennsylvania3h ago @Tim Barrus I assume you substituted “Religion” for “Capitalism” in your ‘opium of the people’s paraphrasing of Marx. Marx’s quote is “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”…
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hey kid i found your doll
first, they will starve you/ that knot in your gut never goes away/ then, they will lock your brother up for shoplifting/ food/ food so you could feed your belly with it food/ then, that bitch from social services keeps coming around and you threw rocks at her car but…
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Tim Barrus, New York Times
“I don’t see how I can make it work.” Right. It’s humiliating. Degrading. We are a region, not a state. How do you address poverty in West Virginia, and forget the states it borders. Haves and have nots all over again. Survival is ephemeral. Nothing works. I borrow the school…
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Tim Barrus, The New York Times
I live in Appalachia. Our people have dogs. Because they help keep us safe. Because we are afraid. For many of us, dogs are all we have. It’s difficult for people who live in parts of the country where things at least sometimes work. Can you imagine a place where…
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GoingRogue: SexWork: BoyWhores
GoingRogue. We’ve been traveling on my bike town-to-town, and we’ve been busy as all hell. I take Andrew with me because he was once a major whore. He raked it in. But drug dealing is more money. Like I care. As if. Andrew projects the tone of authenticity. He can…
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Tim Barrus, New York Times
Going Rogue We are the culture of greed, death, indifference, cruelty, mass incarceration, poverty, hunger, suspicion, hate, patriarchal monarchy disguised as democracy, and genocide. Within the context of that evil, bête noire – exactly how is that any different from the cultural nightmare that was ancient Rome’s legacy to the…
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Sometimes I Ask Them to Build Sets
The stuff they build can be a HodgepodgeCollagePodge of objects all around them. Sometimes, they take photographs, rip them up, and tape them to the wall. Sometimes, the set will be taciturn and unforgiving. Sometimes, what they cobble together is nothing anyone could have anticipated. I do not critic this…
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Death Coin for the Boatman
Tim Barrus New York Times I work with adolescents who are medically fragile. Covid would kill them. Poverty is killing them, and not softly. Their family structures have broken down. There isn’t a single adult in the accumulated families of the group who has work. People are suffering and looking…
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The Inequality of Dreams
As someone who deals with foster children and the foster care system, I note anecdotally, that African-American adolescents do not always articulate that they share many of the dreams that white boys in particular conceptualize seeing themselves as people who can grasp the dream (even when the evidence to the…
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U Better Run
poverty porn like lunar silences i only take the photographs/ it’s a grave thing, to take a place, to objectify it/ our sovereign sleeping leaves no cum stains on the sheets/ you get to comfort yourself with the understanding there is a beauty to the thing/ i have seen appalachia…
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JUXSTAPOSITION
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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Tim Barrus: New York Times: Jumping Off the Cliff
Nicholas Kristoff at the New York Times is speaking about who and what American culture has left behind. I don’t think he sees much hope. If any. But he provides examples of hopefulness on the part of released prisoners. Why. Because he’s writing for an editor. I have written for…
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My Appalachia
I do not know of a single individual in Appalachia who fishes or takes what is seen a food – not an experience – from either the woods or the water. It’s to eat, not to catch, and then release. It’s about survival. Picking wild herbs from the Appalachian hills…
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There Are Things Under Rocks, And Our Backs Are Broken
We now live in a small town in the Blue Ridge mountains. As with most of Appalachia, people live in hollows. A hollow is like a hidden furrow on the planet. It would be possible to live in a hollow and never come out. It’s that isolated. There are things…
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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…
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The Family Ate the Family Dog
the family ate the family dog appalachia is unconditional surrender replacement parts and arguments poverty and the truck shop passing through the bedroom window swallowed by the cardboard that has replaced what glass is left school bus in the morning frost of growling smoke pickled meats and vomit, dark corridors,…