Chicago -
By J.J. Tindall
Someone Might Still Love Me
Demeter in semi-profile,
like Illinois on a map:
sharp brow, full cheek,
lake to her left ear,
glassine underworld
of wrecked ships
and crashed planes,
lovers and suitors
plucked by Hades
who is Time.
Posted on April 25, 2011
By J.J. Tindall
Great Fire
Eyes: bring water.
Great fire burning through.
Apollo, sun-god, king
Of shadows,
Let me burn.
He commanded the shadows
To flee
And there was me,
Posted on March 24, 2011
By J.J. Tindall
ARTERIAL
Willows on the lake weep always
but all trees weep in winter.
Hearts hanging in reverse, denuded,
x-rays of arterial globes,
street by perfectly straight street.
Like the oldest cities on earth,
this one’s a grid,
Posted on February 21, 2011
By J.J. Tindall
I WANNA PAINT REALLY COOL MURALS, MAN
I wanna be a muralist, man.
I wanna paint really cool murals.
Elephants and sausages and very pretty
ladies, and, well, I’m a little off
rainbows these days but
I’ll keep an open mind about it.
A lot of murals already have rainbows.
Huge oranges, fat black cats.
Posted on December 27, 2010
By J.J. Tindall
Surfing to Byzantium
Shining city on a hill.
I’m not kidding.
As in Rome, once.
Boneyard of gods.
Cemeteries were parks, once.
You could picnic
on the presumption
of Potter Palmer,
Posted on December 7, 2010
By J.J. Tindall
SON OF SOME OTHER GUY
“Some other guy is sippin’ up her honey like a yellow dog, oh now
Some other guy, now, has taken my love just like I’m gone, oh now
I’m the lonely one
As long as I can feel all right”
****
Previously, on “Some Other Guy:”
“Awake in the razor’d dark
to the consummate torture
of my own imagination…
Him, luxuriating
in her inspired lewdness…”
****
O Muse!
Evil bitch!
O Love!
Cruel Fate!
Posted on November 17, 2010
By J.J. Tindall
Some Other Guy
Him, luxuriating
in her inspired lewdness.
Her, chuckling
at my timidity and tenderness.
Sweet, shy, cute
v.
Hot, tough, aloof
Posted on November 9, 2010
By J.J. Tindall
Saturday Afternoon
Music, if music, is divine,
the sub-atomic matter of divinity.
Not as a god but as a god might be.
He savored the complacencies
of a beer run, illumined by siren song,
the luminous trill of a woman’s voice
in Spanish–not the tyrannous bleat
of emergency engines–sluicing through
ash-grey alleys like invisible water
through caverns of Indian-corn brick,
fluttering, flirting and luring,
lute en fleur.
Posted on October 19, 2010
By The Beachwood Booksellers Affairs Division
Please join us on Thursday, October 14 for a very special presentation of J.J. Tindall’s Ballots From The Dead.
Choose your own poem to read from our Chicagoetry collection and bring books to donate to our gracious host, Open Books.
Posted on October 4, 2010
By J.J. Tindall
Congress Wars
Memory is the soil of imagination,
the womb of insight,
the crucible of enlightenment.
I have been lighted, lightened,
as by lightning, by revelation
(which rhymes with revolution).
Posted on September 8, 2010
