THE RED CHAIR POEMS

Tim Barrus and the SmashStreet Boys; Show Me Your Life: Poetry Launch: Noon Halloween

• Lately, volunteers.

  I love volunteers. I just don’t need them.

  I do not quite know how to say: I do not need you to volunteer.

  I have no need to reedit what the Smash Street Boys have made.

  I would be excommunicated from paradise; well, not quite paradise, but I would be stripped naked and the monkeys would throw orange rinds at me.

  There are people around who know what we need.

  I don’t get the volunteer thing.

  Buddy. What is a buddy.

  We have enough buddyness.

  My purpose was to connect the kid to his poetry. It’s a process. Mainly because the kid doesn’t know why he’s writing it until he finally realizes why he is writing it.

  This is necessarily divorced from who the audience is and why.

  What audience.

  The audience is not the point. The kid is the point. I think it’s hard for people to visualize kids who have never had any academic success or any success period. At much of anything.

  It’s even harder for people to visualize kids who fall through the cracks as being capable of making anything worthwhile to such an extent, it’s worth their fighting for it.

  Why even go there and let’s not fight over anything.

  It’s art. It’s not advertising.

  That was the point.

  The boys I deal with were hustlers. Everything was a negotiation.

  I want what they make to be intact.

  I am not sure I can articulate why.

  But it’s what I want.

  The Red Chair Poems. It’s about the freedom of expression. That has to have some value to it somewhere.