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

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

Except Sometimes

except sometimes your whispers tell us what you think it is we want to know and you are as always right about a lot of things/ like how pain and loneliness are often the same thing and your books of wandering arms outstretched have brought you here/ https://timbarrusart.tumblr.com

Your Photographs

beneath what photographic darkness does your panic ride and makes no promises to return, in fact, i have never heard you promise shit/ like some kind of human contract with anyone on the planet might elude your perpetual despair/ an exile in the innocence of graves/ how many tombs have…

Fuck World AIDS Day

https://twitter.com/timbarrus

And He Would Fly Away

his heart is rubbish/ he has always lived in his own world/ he knows the outside world is there/ he has simply chosen not to participate/ but such decisions have consequences/ you try changing his wet and shitty diaper/ i double dog dare you/ any romanticism you once held for…

they have all arrived

waving words and wands what terrible days nostalgia makes for loverboys who ask you to hurt them and when you refuse you tell them (as patiently as you can) that it’s the other way around and you will not hurt this one or this one or this one because by…

behind U

and hovering

i belong in that  place with the sacks of seed spilled upon the fallow ground salted with milkweed and armed with cameras and hovering

Tim Barrus in the New York Times

AT NIGHT, THEY PACE you were sleeping and I would sculpt your naked body with the contours of my tongue/ you were that flawless carnal bleeding from your hole/ the inside of my mouth was eros drowned in blood/ in the cold hours of the night, you were awake and…

Put Your Tongue In My Mouth

his tongue was always a sort of ruins set apart from the cold or even from the rest of him his cock his eyes his hands his shit hole his hollow in the mountains where the crows live

I Never Sweep My Steps of Leaves

i never sweep my steps of leaves don’t trip leaning lightly on the memory that time we dodged the rain i held your wrists and and tasted your sybaritic mouth wet as a morning drowning in the lure of the sleep of tongues whose unspent hollow minutes walk down steps…

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…

you split

the proper perspective through silence and then to be pulled away naked by the guards in fields you split into the wet wounds a death of fences https://timbarrus.tumblr.com/

if night should come

if night should come to find us in fields the harvest will die in shallows face to face in the quiet dawns turning us away from sleep/ https://timbarrus.tumblr.com

THE CAMERA SEES THROUGH YOU

the camera sees through you because the camera does not take photographs by itself it needs you it sees through you it uses you it needs you to pick it up it is only through you that the camera has any meaning or relevance at all it is through your…

bikerfuck

like the parking lot chimera you were you’d only fuck me on the bike in public it was the winter of the recent deaths, burning my hole in the growling of the emptiness schoolboys with cigarettes watching and pretending a degree of indifference if you are so i-do-not-care then, why…

smoke and mirrors

the smoke he makes is obvious/ the mirrors in his pocket are less than obvious/ there are people who think he’s a magician/ he does have his tricks, but they’re play for pay, and they usually fall for his i am so into you game of reflective, thin ceramic masks/…

Blood and Money

you were always leaving not in an angry tone but in no tone at all and then you’d be back and crawling into bed most of my kind were awkward in our peasant hostility you were with the boys with money it all came so easily for you knowing as…

shifting differences of breath

the witching hour is when U preserved in amber sleep breathing in your dreams and threads through the sounds of shame swallowing today your children have stones for eyes and suffering cold their fallen snow melts wet upon a witch’s tongue https://tim-barrus.format.com/about