Chicago -
By J.J. Tindall
Life
Life is a series of deaths:
self outlasts self outlasts self.
Yesterday remanded to the shelf,
today is the tongue of the bell.
Life is a series of deaths:
resented parents, neglected siblings,
forsaken friends finally become
what they always were: true saints.
Posted on January 20, 2010
By J.J. Tindall
Funeral for a Bastard Year
Four stockbrokers took residences in Italy. Four hundred nobodies lost everything.
– Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby
I know where the bodies are buried:
Lincoln Park before the zoo was there.
Pre-Fire the land with graves was filled.
I move to add our Annus Horribilis.
Posted on December 29, 2009
By J.J. Tindall
Bad
“I do not want to be friends
or anything else.
I want a complete break
for good.
This whole thing has been bad
from the start.”
Posted on December 8, 2009
By J.J. Tindall
Gleam
I and I buckle at the weight of the load.
I and I suckle at the nape of liberty.
I and I rankle at the prospect of servitude.
I and I cackle at the vehemence of zealotry.
I and I seethe from a locus of pain.
I and I breathe in and breathe out again.
I and I ponder every cloud above the swarm.
I and I wonder if the horse is out the barn.
Posted on November 10, 2009
By J.J. Tindall
Illumination
I strove to summon the gods
with cliches of madness. Pose after pose, put on after put on,
point of view after
point of view.
Then the Old Post Office became a sphinx
in a late dawn
Posted on October 15, 2009
By J.J. Tindall
The Picture of Dorian Gray
A dining jacket of fresh asphalt,
boulevard after boulevard
of sturdy, fragrant
boutonnieres, cocktail in hand,
Our Town as
Dorian Resplendent.
Posted on September 30, 2009
By J.J. Tindall
For Margaret
Oasis
O: that’s my SELF
floating before me
content and contrite,
liberated by quietude
and the slant
of autumn light.
Posted on September 14, 2009
By J.J. Tindall
The Longest Spring
My soul has committed local treason
by praying aloud for an endless spring.
A restless lake, white-blue sky, bouyant breeze;
songs chubby robins and jaybirds do sing;
the soft, green sea of undulating sod
which glistens through Humboldt Park in the rain
had me sighing to that three person’d God
we project my wish such bliss They sustain.
Summer popped by for Lollapalooza
and may yet return as foliage fades.
Thus bray not like a Canadian goose
that spring extended its brief staycation.
Send not to know where the lost season went.
We’ve been spared our summer of discontent.
Posted on September 2, 2009
By J.J. Tindall
SHANGRI-LA SHATTERED
Look: tatters. Tattered
concrete coat upon
steel-rod sticks.
Leave it shattered,
the shuttered Shangri-La Hotel,
ersatz Shamabala
Posted on August 11, 2009
By J.J. Tindall
WHITE DREAM
Dreams come
in clouds, floating through
the blue
brain. There goes fame,
there fortune, there
beautiful
Posted on July 20, 2009
