but they have no idea what they’re talking about.

The truth is that ignorance is bliss.

That love and lost shit really has no clout

I’ve always been afraid that I’m really unimportant,

and this seems to confirm my every, awful thought.

When it feels like I can be just brushed away,

nine months of commitment turns into putrid rot.

All the good memories have turned into ash

Painful reminders of what I’ll never again have

I should have seen it from far away,

and I did. I’m not that blind.

But broken hope fed my desperation…

You know, I haven’t cried like this in a long, long time.

And then, of course, there are the other people.
Some of them, regardless of the day, look so bad they burn the eyes.
Then the there’s the folks who look so odd
that you can’t tell if they’re real or you’re dreaming.

Then there’s a whole other class of person…
it’s a little hard to explain.
Let me go off track a little here
and, hopefully, you’ll catch my meaning.

Do you ever wonder if we see the same colors?
I mean, you might see blue and I might see blue,
but my blue looks like your yellow and your green my orange.
And it’s secretly completely different even though you seeing exactly what I’m seeing.

Okay, so now for that other class of person, of which you are an example.
You think you have both good days and bad.
And you, on those bad days, say that you look, well, pretty bad,
and if somebody says different you really aren’t believing.

However, you see, my blue is different from your blue.
And, even though you think you don’t look good,
you’re just simply wrong.
Because, even on your worst of the worst days,
you are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

Ireland is a sunflower in a field of drab imitations.
Ireland is precious and as beautiful as sunlight in the rain.
Bright and gorgeous,
a splash of yellow in the wet green fields
under a strangely blue sky.

Ireland changes the world you’re in.
She inspires poetry and song and the shaping of things with your hands.
She inspires every human male.

Once you step foot in her delicate soil,
if you don’t think you’re simply the luckiest man on Earth,
then you have no soul
and there is no hope in Heaven or on Earth for you.

When I hear Róisín Dubh.
I think of Ireland
and I think of my beautiful, bright sunflower.

Now you may ask who could this angel with a golden laugh possibly be.
Everyone should know who she is. She’s erin (with a little e).

and, like me, the sun is having a hard time getting out of bed.

Robert Ullrey’s encouraging voice echoes in my ears

to the soundtrack of bland techno.

He’s 43, you know?

He lives in California.

And on his 43^rd birthday, he decided he wanted to start running again.

He tells me this three times a week right before I decide to torture myself.

Walkinville

I dream of living each day as if it were new
But most of all, I dream simply of you

I’m out here to read
Something
But my mind is too busy being depressed
Thinkjng about all the girlfriends I never had
All the genius that’s leaked out of my skull all these years
Eaten away by hours and hours of brain melting entertainment
Which corrodes one’s psyche until it’s left a calcified lump in
The stubbornly knocking engine atop your head

The future feels distant as the green wisps blow the wrong direction
Into my eyes
So distant, in fact, that it feels like a fictional world
Fame, fortune, family, and Santa Clause all have lunch on the beaches of Never Neverland
They share a sushi platter and a particularly tomato heavy salad
While the buzz sets in
I’ve accidentally inhaled too much
and now I’m too focused on not getting sick to be depressed

My wishes and my tobacco have a lot in common
I think I’ll stop smoking and just let the damp make my face all sticky

I slide a book, delicately, from its home in the shelf,
admiring the cover which fruitlessly tries to convey the universe within.
Then, with a turn, I slither inside,
enraptured by imagination transferred to word:
images, people, places, smells, and magic,
all captured in tiny squiggly lines
scratched on a page.

I could be here forever.