silence the voices

Tim Barrus

Tim Barrus: The New York Times

The monkey cannot beat the jones. Sometimes, photography says it all. Sometimes, photography is straightforwardly in your face. Safron Foer’s piece, and the photograph that accompanies it, hits hard at Americans who struggle with addiction, and the Americans who do not struggle with addiction. To meat. No one wants to…

And There Was the Turning of the Earth

the various cures that evade us — temporarily — are always seen as impermanent as his tongue inside my mouth and the tower was your eyes gone wrong/ what is evident is that we are dust as well/ the sun from another state was the way you turned in bed/…

A Deviant’s Morning Eyes

the way it unfolded was not unlike the way it always unfolds/ we are at opposite ends of a picnic table/ six feet apart/ but connecting/ boats in the immediate distance bobbing about on the water smelled of rich people somewhere else/ i am sitting with andrew as the dew…

Quarantined Boys

#Does that mean sex, too.” #Sex, too,” I explained. “It’s just another virus, not at all unlike the one you have.” There was a long silence among the boys. One disease could take more than we thought we could handle. Two was an abstraction. We do get out at night.…

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

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…

Waiting For the Trick to Come

you are hoping he washes his ass in the shower because you are painfully aware that he’s going to demand that you eat it/ waiting, always waiting/ it makes no sense because they’re all on the clock anyway/ making you wait is going to cost them, but you’ve never been…

Mainly The Lot of Us Are Puppets

pretending no one pulls our fucking strings we cannot be manipulated baby, you are so manipulated your spcks glow

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

the bullies who live in toilets

we speak to bullying and abuse on playgrounds, on sidewalks, on the bus, but we do not speak to bullying and abuse that occurs in toilets because we are ashamed/ teachers are afraid and bullying is rampant even if the media has refocused on different parts of the news cycle,…

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…

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…

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

dazzled or enough

https://timbarrusart.tumblr.com

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…

Tim Barrus in the New York Times

We begin this video in a graveyard. We end the writing part of this in the same graveyard. You will not get it. But then, we don’t make jack shit for you. So what IS mainstream art. The video (above) has no name. It has no stars. It has no…

1933

holding me up

in the war against boys, first you cut off their legs/ well, i am ill, but i’m not dead/ and i don’t know which of those i prefer because that limb which i have lost, well it was the only thing holding me up, holding me up/ https://timbarrusart.tumblr.com

2 Straight Boys Hungry As a Straining Rope

the camera speaks because that is what it is designed to do/ digging down past the edges deep/ turf or the boundary lines kinda fade away/ they are almost scared/ the disingenuous would call it new horizons/ actually, what straight males fear the most is shit/ the land of the…

le crib

from above we see…

Tim Barrus: New York Times: Get Real

Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times tells us to hit the streets. Nine million Americans live in the streets. Exactly how is it that they’re supposed to hit them. The New York Times people are smart and they have good intentions. But they live in a well-funded bubble, and…

New York Times: On Queer Childhood

I mentor boys at-risk for HIV. Many of them do sex work. They don’t carry the baggage of typical adolescents. Their baggage is a lot more breath-taking. People see delinquency, the juvenile justice system, and detention. None of which work. That people do not understand homelessness, hunger, and hate, is…