Never enough, too loved, not loved enough, not being able to love fully, loving incompletely.

There is this loneliness everywhere,

You can see it in the front door of a supermarket store, its reflecting in your beer and untouched whisky,

It’s in the face of a woman waiting for a telephone call that never comes, in a one bedroom apartment with plastic flowers in waterless vase, untouched, unloved,
faithfully waiting for each night to pass.

Then maybe you can shine like a diamond or a knife, but only for a brief second.

<<<<>>>>

Time has forgotten you, you beautiful thing. It moves through you like a record spinning at half speed.

You are unusually cold and you move slowly in a fog like, your pail skin shining in a distance and reflecting the dystopian world.

Your heart is faintly beating still, powered by the last sparks of the long forgotten love.

I hope time never catches up with you.

<<<<>>>>

I don’t think I can ever fully express this because words lose meaning with time and you and I are timeless.

Yet you understand everything, as you sit at the end of the world, on the edge of a burned out star, smoking the last cigarette in humanity carved out of a single ray of light.

We are made of all those who have build and broke us. But that doesn’t matter anymore for we are holding everything in those last hours.

<<<<>>>>

That Saturday night they meet at Bloor Cinema and saw a Woody Allen film set in New York City. Somehow he sensed that she might be fond of Woody Allen movies and also that no one has ever taken her to see one. After the movie they strolled around the twilight streets slowly descending in to the night. Rain started to fall, lightly drizzling the busy streets and transforming people and buildings into supernatural beings straight out of the fairy tales. Time slowed down for them and they instinctively knew every rain drop, every brick in the road and every tree by its name. They were outside of time now, in a way that an hour could feel like a minute or a second, a day or a year, it was all relevant. He held her hand and she returned the gesture with a delicate hold of her own at the same time realizing that they haven’t spoken since leaving the theatre. Worried, as she was about to break the silence she noticed something remarkable; their hands lined up exactly at the wrist where their arteries met, and she could feel his pulse through her own, beating at the exact same speed, in a perfect sync with her own heart. They were now in New York City.

<<<<>>>>

I broke a branch from a tree of love and I buried it in the ground, in a small wooden coffin draped in all the sorrows of the world. But oh look, my garden has blossomed. From a small dying branch.

You can’t kill love you see, not even if you tried, not even in death.

<<<<>>>>

I am here to tell you that I am rooting for you and that I love you and that you are capable of doing the most beautiful things.

Hang on just a little bit longer because the darkness never lasts and you can beat the night with the sun that rises in you. Remember always, the gods are proud of you.

Hang on a little longer, for your life is worth every pain you had to go through.

Darkness never lasts.

<<<<<<<>>>>>>>

Tom Preisler is a poet and a musician based out of Toronto, Canada.  His poems are often characterized by retrospective meditations and deeply influenced by the writings of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Bukowski, Dylan, Dennis Johnson, Ginsberg and Kerouac.  This is his first collection.