If It’s Poetry At Least U Will Have a Defense

I am allowed to write about intimacy a little bit in novels but it’s intimacy that really scares you. The American family itself is highly conflicted. But if I wrap poetry around the thing (I do not always get away with this NYT), it becomes more mysterious, it’s smoother than…

Up 2 No Good

l’aube extérieure s’est glissée dans la pièce/ne le regarde pas/ne lui donne pas ce qu’il veut/c’est mon travail/

Tim Barrus and the New York Times

“Sometimes my stuff gives aperture as a leakage another good name. Or. An identity. Often, I am not looking in a straightforward way at my subject’s eyes. Eyes insinuate a relationship. Relationships will hurt you. If I am using x-rayy technology, I am the one who manages where the eyes…

Tim Barrus: for hiding this in the snow

I used to ask the questions. Now, Pi is asking me the questions. There is something in his voice that wants to be wanted. – tim barrus

You Are Over Your Head

your hair and shampoo and open the windows you have been thinking again and let me lick the lemon from your hands we will drink gin tonight and laugh at all the wounds we ever had and wonder how it is we dream of one of us is the other…

U Can Write An Entire Sex Scene Just About the Eyes

so this morning, he turns over in his wondering where he is, and just before it all comes back to him, to face me with his bedroom eyes, and i am, as always, taking his photograph/ he rolls his eyes/ he asks if there is anything about me that has…

This Is How You Always Slept

There was no way I could do this. I need sheets and blankets pulled up over my head to keep the demons out. https://timbarrusart.tumblr.com

pushing inside you

i would push you up against the tree/ you asked me to please push you up against the tree/ especially in the sodden rain/ you were like a watermark/ all the delicate debris of life/ the smell of your shit and sweat/ the weather never really mattered/ your insides were…

Our Travel Plans Got Dark

your dreams lurked about the woods risking barbed wire fences that tore our shirts and once my right tit/ i still have that scar/ i do not know why i thought of it as your tree but i did/ mainly because you put a claim on it in much the…

Fish Gut

there is no forgiveness in beds of rusted stone/ your flesh and bone and cock and hole incontinent with the despair of desire/ you lived in a coven of us but our eyes had been sewn tight with fish gut/ https://timbarrus.tumblr.com

DRIVING THE TIME MACHINE

look, it’s a truck, the only time i am allowed in their private world – or for that matter any adult is allowed in their private world – is when i am driving the time machine/ their beds were dragged up to the roof where they sleep in a time…

Signs

Any relationship requires work.

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…

We Had to Stop…

toward whose delirious repose

you in your distance toward whose delirious repose suggesting structures of scars i have seem them all i have touched them all i have followed them with my lizard’s tongue i want to thank you for teaching me a  huge, huge fucking lesson/ never get arrested/ https://timbarrus.tumblr.com

Memory’s Machine

lost afternoons justly placed each mirror could be manifest beyond sex work is still work and sweat and humiliation just like any other form of work an arrangement of perspective sheets, walls, scrubbing floors in unison our lips in full abundance we brought along our gods from the pawn shops

Watch His Eyes At The End

watch his eyes at the end if you are one of my friends and i ask you if i might film you i would advise you to say no it’s easier that way and darkness starts inside of things like will i be good enough and you get it that…

his mouth is mute

his mouth is mute the fencing between us like the land of famished dust on the cellar stairs all winter long morning in the woods disguised in hoods the longitude of knowing how fractured grief is buried in the voiceless ground https://timbarrus.tumblr.com

Your Hands And Your Heart

i stole your insufferable wings/ dragging your heart through the ashes of my stars/ your hospital rooms on an empty china plate/ i would write your life, but plastic roses will not do/

When They Realize

when they realize that life is a fight for it/ all of life is a fight for all of it/ or whatever rush of it they can get a hold of and grab/ all you need are fists/ when they realize that i have survived most of what they continue…

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…

what more can they take away

when I was naked and riding tigers arrogantly around your house silent and unhurried nightbound roads I took you to the carnival you were withholding even then unbind my tongue thin curtains candle wax and worn a startling receptivity to omens your opalescent asshole reconstructed crimes among the glances words…

a semblance of sorrowing

a semblance of sorrowing was the cage you built to keep us enclosed from the seasons and the snow/ i’m in the backseat of the jeep with the empty potato chip bags on the floor and the cookie crumbs/ you drove all night/ in the morning there was fog, and…

the timekeeper

you and your adolescent wandering/ all the dark places and that lurid glare/ your river stories/ the villages are always deserted/ your age was that summer a jury/ morning snowstorms and we just went back to bed/ the virile ivory in the temples of taboo perceives the shipwreck and the…

post-card nomadic

first-one features the camera will come on again dragging out revenge to some stupefied consensus i used to take you to all the shoots pizza for breakfast you were hungover from the night before you called me a post-card nomadic i have been called worse limited access studio shoots are…