In the sepia evening,
the day crumbles away,
trickles to night,
my hands are blue,
trousers torn,
ripped and worn ,
a black rainbow,
venturesome overhead,
brilliant in its lunacy.

-Jamie F. Nugent

If you are going to kick someone,
Use both feet.
If it looks like it is leaning,
Give it a shove.
Bend it until it breaks
And then bend it some more.
If you are going to shout,
Blow your lungs out.
If you are going to run,
Run fast and run far.
If you are going to jump,
Don't say when.
If you are going to love,
Love completely
And without an apology.
Just never regret
Or say sorry.

-Jamie F. Nugent

He was a Beatle and she was a Stone,
She was a Pistol and he was a Ramone.

I won't let this flame
burn me twice.
I won't once more
tease the taste
of your poison.
You're poison.
I knew I was inside
your aviary cage
made of glass,
But I didn't know
That I was trapped.
Spending our interlude
in the doldrums;
This Vaudeville
of lovers.
These back street
tricks we'd turn
on each other,
just to evoke
a little joyously.
That was our
real theater.

-Jamie F. Nugent

And tonight your house will be cold,

And tonight your mind will be clear,

And tonight your heart will be free,

And tonight, your fight finished, swift,

And this morning, you could not hold on,

So tonight, you will not have to.

-Jamie F. Nugent

I want you.
I want you
not to leave
just yet.
I want you
not to go
off into
that ***** storm.
I want you
to taste sweetness,
my sweetheart.
I want you
to stick around,
just a while longer,
Like a candle
Caught up in
an inferno.
I want you.


-Jamie F. Nugent

You're a summer's day
Our minds in this melody
In sunshine, Just drenched.

-Jamie F. Nugent

Drawing our old anchor,rusty red from riverbed,
Posting indefinite postcards in courtyards and
Setting sail off into the habitual horizons,
Where that true blue hue sky lays askew
Touches that raindrop mountaintop,that green sea,
Unforeseen,cuts the sunrise like a guillotine,
We venture further,where there,then any eye could see.
We fall off the edges of our little perfect world
As we fell to the floor of seashore bent back,
An attack from laughing aloud to ourselves proud,
There is no real worry or hurry out on these waters,
There are no real appeal of troubles out here
In this notion of ocean .

-Jamie F. Nugent

Electric blankets,
Three Duvets to warm me up,
I'd still rather you.


-Jamie F. Nugent

I would rather share this bed
With fire ants,
Their toxin is just green tea
compered to what you spit out.

I would rather share this heart
With Ahemait, and become restless forever;
Because you would swallow this heart too easily,
And have me die a third time.


-Jamie F. Nugent

And the kisses became fewer,
The sentences became shorter,
The light-bulb was just about flickering,
The cigarette was just about ash now,
The fire on its deathbed;
Coughing its burning lungs out,
The odds became the ends,
That *****-tonk piano grew more out of tune,
Until there were no tunes at all,
The butterflies flew from our stomachs,
The wild-swans soared from our gardens,
Leaving us to sing our own swansong.

-Jamie F. Nugent

A morning that should be bright by now,
But it is just a cacophony of wet leaves,
The back-braking ice marrying the road’s cheek,
And now I stand in it, but I never said goodbye,
How could I?
I was too busy holding on to the bones of a tree,
To get away from swirling drains of
Puddles, eleven stories deep,
Washing away into temporal streams,
My shoes are falling apart and
My mind is wringing wet.

-Jamie F. Nugent

An old calendar ,
A Christmas present from me,
Only seen nine mouths.

-Jamie F. Nugent

You seemed so level headed and you
Used to be oh so pragmatic and jumped
To the point of view, never once needing to
Call for help ever in your life, you just left
Me standing there, with a pencil
On my ear, so I could write down
My point of view, if I needed out of this
Cell, this windowless room, I take my one
phone call, but yours is the number I know off.

-Jamie F. Nugent

How you fell from grace,
Brittle leafs from Autumn trees,
Have I fallen too?

Jamie F. Nugent

I ate the whole world to find you.
Yesterday, and days before,
these are just bohemian villages to me,
where a boy flies a blue kite,
sees the sun on your back
and rainclouds in synecdoche.

Today, tomorrow,
but mostly today,
when the clogs blossom
yellow daffodils that
hide bare hairy heels,
bold and black
as Twiggy mascara.

A thousand phone calls later,
there won't be an answer.

For all our intermissions
were like cancer
ward smoke breaks.

Purple hands stained yellow,
with a dark blue mouth saying,

"Hold me, please just hold me".

Even if just for the warmth,
warmth which was
lacking here,
as cold as inside Russian tanks.

We hugged,
with all the surprise and violence
as an acid attack
on supermodels face,
we hugged.

Then after that,
tried as Latvian money,
half-alive in a ditch
pining over you,
the way a cat's tongue
pines for milk and breadcrumbs,
Tasted like salt, they did,
The tears that were shed,
Giving drinks to the mice.

(For Jaimie)

Orange sky, brings the early dawn,
I think to myself in sleepless yawn.
Because I am slightly too tired to say,
In the dawn, of this, my best friend's birthday,
Into thoughts in my head, I sink,
How it is just so insane to think,
She is a women now!
She is a women,how?
In all strange ways, we are almost the same,
In all strange ways, almost the same name,
Her heart is like a morning of spring,
Sounding of bluebirds, the songs they sing,
So let us sit down, relax in the kitchen,petal,
Slip off your shoes, as I boil the kettle.

-Jamie F. Nugent

Memories you modify
To bring out the best of the erstwhile past,
Recollections like confections,
Constructions of reminiscence
That have been build rather then lived;
Sandblasting reality,
Sometimes
You can't take your eyes off actuality,
Sometimes
You don't know where to look.


-Jamie F. Nugent

I stood there,
5'11 in secondhand shoes,
by the gate, house of god,
in the sun-drenched midday;
She drove up and parked,
as the bells rang out,
in her stainless sliver car,
newer then her leopard print hat
covering her white hair,
she approached me like a shadow,
twisted and hunting,
I stood there
by my red bucket full of change;
I did not wish her a 'good' morning,
instead just morn',
she walked up without saying a word,
but then,
when she was as close as she could get,
she said in the falsest of tone and substance,
'Good morning' and walked on,
the bucket, no fuller then before,
she walked in,
I doubt she could even spell cerebral palsy.

-Jamie F. Nugent

I have measured out
Your sweetness with teaspoons,
I love you without sugar.

I have watched in awe,
As you sat down in the hallways
Of muscle museums and catacomb churches,
I love you without wax.

-Jamie F. Nugent

You were my only pleasure,
You were my only softness,
You brought out my best, but these days,
You bring out my paranoia,
When I turn the street's corner,
Thinking I see you in the corner
Of my eye, only to be
Another girl with your same composure.
Sometimes, I am just a heartbeat away
From the button on the telephone
That reads '4'
The last digit of your digits,
But then, I put the telephone to bed,
Just like I should put this to bed.

-Jamie F. Nugent

The amount of times,
I've nearly burned this house down,
"Accidentally".

-Jamie F. Nugent

It is only when you are handed that milk-glass,
The appetite dissipates,
'Oh how it will leave a queer lactic
Taste on my pink tongue'

Only when you press the Coke-glass
To your lips, bubbles tickling your noise,
That the curving goes,
'Oh how will it leave my teeth
Feeling funny and loose'

The headache you get from
Watching too much telly'
And too much chocolate,
A pain in your belly.

A notion of thought
So perfect as a pearl
In your head,
To sing, laugh, dance, cry, love
Until you are dead.

The oblivion of bliss
Brought about when have
Won, conquered, got, ate, drank, bought, finished.

Conclusions are so finite.


-Jamie F. Nugent

The Christmas tree was dragged down,
Slayed like a beast, she was
Skinned of her decoration hide,
She looked a lot less pretty naked,
But God, she looked wild and free,
She was not ready to wither away,
She was not going to lay down and die,
Not just yet,
Not just now.

-Jamie F. Nugent

Just knowing that
you would be there
at the station to see me off,
a quick sweet kiss,
and then that look,
as I would shout out
a goodbye,
just knowing that,
made it not an impossibly to leave.

You still make my heart beat twofold,
and the boiling blood rush in my vains.

Do I make that heart pump a little faster?
That pulse,that throb, throb, throb.
If you were at the station,

Then I must.

-Jamie F. Nugent

All along the cove,
a rare pretty sight,
the beach, hot as a stove,
barely a breeze to fly a kite.

When strolling down the strand,
no matter how far I go,
always a few shoulder deep in sand,
thankful the tide is still low.

Inevitable company found here,
Whether wanted or not, fine,
men slugging warm beer,
women sipping white wine.

Lazy Sunday afternoon,
Here, no worry at all,
we leave having done so too soon,
all along the cove, just having a ball.

Just as mine was given completely to you,
You threw it in the *******,
Like it was tainted, spoiled;
As if you can just go out and get more,
But I am past closing time,
So do not catch your death
If I treat you so coldly,
But do not try and warm up to me either;
You sure do have a lot of gallI gave you chocolates,
When you wanted flowers,
To act so boldly.
A confused carpet of torn up invitations
And old mutilated photographs,
I gave you chocolates,
When you wanted flowers.


-Jamie F. Nugent

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
I can't change that
Or how I feel for you.

Daisies are yellow,
When the Lilies have died,
You sing like a cello,
Five-hundred watts amplified.

Birds of Paradise, away they fly,
Up to the burning Sunflowers,
Gone without a goodbye,
In the hypnotic early morning hours.

And Tulips upon Tulips
To cover your pillow under your head,
And Tulip petals to cover the apocalypse
That hides behind your lips of red.


-Jamie F. Nugent

What name can I give you?
Surely there are none
and it is pointless to try,
like giving names to
celestial bodies,
or quantum particles.  

I thought I could capture it,
that the gaps would be filled in,
like space between
crocodile teeth
clasped on a zookeeper's hand.
I thought
If I could paint like Wyeth,
I'd have my Helga.

What name do I give you?

Maybe Odessa,
laughing on the crest of a wave,
dragged by purple currents,
among gulls on Earth,
and storms in the sea?

Perhaps Athena,
with gleaming eyes
and an owl in your hand?

Or Queen Maeve,
raw with beauty,
buried upright
facing your enemies?

Infeasible,
but it must be something,
for the shake of necessity,
So as to call out when
loitering on lake's edge,
or from across a room
when I see you there,
uncanny as my reflection
in a convex mirror.

I'll call it out.

It's not that I want to,
but that I do;
Just as frogs jump,
just as the tongue
pushes on the aching tooth,
I see Venice in
cheekbone crevices,
smell Vienna in a tangle of hair.

This tropism is
an elephant stomping
the marrow out of me,
and it's alright,
it feels good,
and Wisdom is her name.

That little black bottle of stout,
That you gave to me years ago;
Will never be drank nor poured out
Into drains or in through lips, I know
As my heart would go with it as well,
Spilled out until it is hallow;
It is so simple and easy to tell,
If that little bottle breaks,
My heart would soon fallow.

-Jamie F. Nugent

Under a certain light,
with calm mollifying gleam,
at the touch of a hand
aphasia sets in quick,
sudden and sweet, and
submerged in a pool of milk,
I become a toy submarine.

When candles did die,
burnt to their wicks,
I hear you sing,
holding up half of my skies,
convulsive muscles flex,
as if a broken thing
was longing to be fixed.

Surly time stilled passed?
Though from its presence,
we were absentees,
too preoccupied with
our arms stretched outwards
weightless as bodies
on the Dead Sea.

Seeing her smile
Is like
Reaching into
Your coat
Pocket and
Finding a
Mars Bar
And a
Cumpled €10 note,
Slightly sweeter,
Slightly richer,
Now.


-Jamie F. Nugent

Maybe not just now,
It might not be tomorrow,
Soon, we'll wait no more.

-Jamie F. Nugent

Only tongues could tell,
Just what happened in this room,
From behind the sun.

-Jamie F. Nugent.

You are not in my heart,
You are under my fingernails,
You are not on the tip of my tongue,
You are stuck in my teeth,
You are not in my dreams,
You are in my headaches,
You are not in my soul,
You are in my lungs,
You are not the taste on my lips,
You are the lump in my throat,
You are apart of me,
You are not every part of me..

-Jamie F. Nugent

Thoughts about you,
songs about you,
These people about you,
no worries in this world
when they're about you,
nither do I,
I try,
I try not to try to try,
but you've settled down,
gotten comfortable
as if at home,
alone, dinner for one,
all up in my skeleton,
But did I made you up?
No -
you took me down
to the underlying
side of a
melting iceberg,
where the penguins sit upon it
as the sun beats away
like a burning want,
strange animalist desire -
There's no magnetic field on Mars,
There
I wouldn't be pulled
one way or the other way,
There we would
just drift, like
melting icebergs
along red sand,
along mountains
the height of Everest,
almost as high
As I hold
you in my mind,
My closed first,
An open mouth,
could wait,
but it's
adolescent
fantastic fanatic fantasy,
maybe once,
not now,
not later,
but after later
at least,
at last -
45 minute blissful stints
better
the days
after days
after days
of the dull,
and nights
underneath
nights
inside
nights
Of null.

The cold of early morning,
The cold that hits my sleepy dusty eyes,
And gets inside my drowsy head,
So much so that,
My thoughts become transfixed, frozen;
There is nothing but that chill,
That chill that whispers, winter is melting away,
That chill that sings, summer won't be long now,
That chill that screams, the chill won't stay.

-Jamie F. Nugent

Through the gloom,
The air's brisk bite
Shovelled through and
Down my throat.

As I stood with them,
But alone
Outside your window;
Inside,
Memory
Came back to a mind,
This mind,
Scatterbrained and
Singing lyrics we
Once bellowed to eachother.
You sing and laugh in there still.

The things done in that room which
I'll never set foot in again.

Catharsis and chocolate
Coat shingles of my mouths roof.
This is what happens
When you run out of nothing -
When only a Viking funeral pyar
Would do
For you,
All of you,
Even the parts you couldn't get back,
When you smoked a James Joyce,
While the nurse let you out
For a cigarette.

Girls in tears,
Boys choking on bones of regret.
We're just children
Wanting, teething, weeping;
With a few more grays,
A little less grace, and
Every heart swelling with love,
Bursting into song,
tears, flames.

In nights with no sleep,
Only conversation,
The morning was years away.

I admire the cluster
of photographs
hanging perfectly askew
as you carefully
put our preferred ingredients
between slabs of bread
that you place on plates
then place on the table.

Right now,
as the cat does a figure eight
around my legs
under the table,
you are one billion seconds old  
and have left the tea brewing for too long,
you say, assuaging:
'It takes on a slight bitter taste, but that's about it.'

Emerging like an aftertaste:
I only notice now
how sober a light
streams through
the curtains to
smear your cheek
In a milk white wash.

You far off there
wrapped in blankets
like a parcel,
limp limbs wrapped
around and about me,
the bent legs
and elbows jutting
in every direction.

A black trickle of hair
pillowclung,
Peppers its fragrance
like the soft tang
that gingerbread
imparts on the mouth.

We, wordless
and breathless,
were more than a little
ill suited to this,
like two sprawling dogs
on a hot trampoline.

A shaky hand that
possesses paper cuts
and letters of lovers' past
is bleeding brilliant
as a sunset.

Bespectacled milky eyes
twitch in and out
of consciousness
like a revolving door
with no exit.

Misshapen ballerina feet
seize up and cramp,
often their hue goes from
the colour of raw meat,
when until becoming still,
settle into blue.

Warmth goes,
the whole of the body
like a pound-shop doll
after too much play,
is reduced to
an artifact only to be
handled by white gloves,
in a dim room smelling faintly
of dust and mahogany.

In such rooms
often there are
recollections of
the whole of the body,
dancing dances
of rapture and grace
on the tips
of ballerina feet.

We were soon to dislodge
ourselves from this
embarrassing embrace,
though longed to be
as permanent
as the trees:
Arcadian spectators
longing speechlessly to let
our discolored ancestors
live in a fortified mound of leaves.

A cigarette burning
at her elbow,
he proposed
“I will give you sponge cake and cider
in exchange for alcoholic lullabies.”

Too late for that now;
the stars pierced the pale vale
spread heavily
over an August night,

Far too late
She rose gauchely,
brushed sawdust from her cheeks
                        and wandered
out into the open,
into a reality that she knew then
would soon become
a stolid simple thing.

What is left of late?
Uttered the mouth out
to a sky, dull,
deadened with clouds,
snagged by cranes,
like scythes slicing heavenward;
49 crying horns sound.

What has happened?
Unhappily not happened?
What is left?
               Only the husk
and the head,
strange with sawdust,
and the eyes glace through glasses
as if through fog
at the rain,
    the rain,
    the rain,
the clogged drain.

'I'm told the dumb trace passes.'
said yourself, through the
pencil sketch of a smile.

With a passing glance of folly,
we, like gulls
mull over broken brollies.

Fluttering like bats abound,
each a failure to the
dampening shelter seekers,
their soul soaked,
their intentions drenched,
returning (rained on relentlessly)
     to their nest,
to dry,
to try and rest.

Alone now,
so could now,
the face felt
unsure whether
to freeze or melt.

Surveying the sky
whilst falling to the ground,
down I knelt.

The sun first rose
when I set sight on you,
the one who crushed up
all credence
with mortar and pestle,
pulverized until
finer than milky
Spanish sand
under the bare foot
of a fat British tourist,
gazing at half-buried
Camels mouthing
the words

"fumar mata."

In a desert,
I waited for dawn,
I danced for rain,
I thought of you,
and that somewhere
there was a little stray
dog lapping up puddle-water,
a Polish beer bottle pressed
to a drunkard's swollen lip,  
like a hose filling up
a plastic blue paddling pool,
while the children stood in the sun.

She’s filled with colours.
They emanate as if
from a beehive,
fill this head,
make smooth all edges,
and borderlines of mine.

An orange August sun at dawn,
Risies like a lid.    

Wake me, wake me,
show me now,
please,
show me
colours again.

Bent over double,
my spine crinkling
and made from tinfoil.

Like an old concertina,
you wheeze from
the stress of it all,
so do I, quietly
to myself.

You're startled upon
an anthill's discovery,
as if it were found in
a lover's rumpled bed.

Beetles clamber away,
away from the sweat,
from the sighs
given freely away
to Mother Earth,
or anyone who'll listen.

An emerald frog
springs from
a verdant patch,
into a wet ditch.

Unkind to the body,
is this toil,
but the thoughts roam,
like a pig in muck,
laughing,
if it could.

White cotton flowers
coat the ground,
like peckish gulls
         on a landfill,
or a sailor's corpse.

After tracks are made,
here left for there,
blood trickles
down shins,
knee-deep
in brambles.

The nest of the lark,
the hive of honeybee,
the owl doesn't dare,
the sweet tooth,
nor bare hand,
doesn't dare.

I go on walking,
with Quasimodo slouch,
feeling the spring
of the cracked ground,
kinetic and tepid,
under my own weight.

I could sleep
easy and dreamless,
away in a damp ditch,
pillow of frogs,
(still soft emeralds)
blanket of muck,
stiffening under
the sun on high,
shimmering soft and
red as a Bolshevik.

Then,
in 2,000 years,
I'll join them,
those who I saw
in a museum once,
with skin like
bog oak,
jaws ajar,
with eyes of dust,
they couldn't
look away.

By fireplace,
growing colder,
the instinct coffee,
a soiled sorry bath,
had a foamy continent
he struggled to slurp down.

Shuffle down the hall,
shuffle off this mortal coil.

Trousers clung to the waist like
an autumn thing ready to die,
my mother about to cry,
clung to brittle hand and
brittle arm.

Her and I, in
parentheses
escorting
A coffin,
lungs lousy
with sawdust,
coughing up
black maladies in
silver spirals
to fade
In the air,
Always, and ever,
It seems,
The Christmas air.

In the city again
and it feels less novel than ever.

In the city again
waking up in my lovers bed,
she is still and soft like a loaf of bread.

In the city again
where people who are
busy, breathless and caffeinated
do not say hello.

In the city again
Where weeds wither on
a green roundabout,
where posh elongated vowels  
assault my ears
like a cold blue breeze.

In the city again
where political graffiti
and the same 3 tags
cover all like a blanket,
where yellow buses dissolve into the night.

In the city again
Where ancient corduroy clad men
stumble out of churches,
Where a secretary leaves a memo
for the manger,
where tinkers temp tourists
Onto a horsedrawncart.

In the city again
under the days dark weight again,
where we all attain
the usual filth under the fingernails.

In the city again
and it feels almost like a home.

Candles.
Must get candles.
Did I get them before?
Sure where was I before?

I was nowhere.
Biting chunks out of the doors,
lumps out of the floor.
Try as I might,
I can't leave.

Now?

Not in this.
The snow's falling sideways.
The state of it,
all nimble and white.

A lot of tears last night;
and tonight?
No great difference,
but perhaps it could be worse?
Worse than before
I was nowhere.
Among the thorns,
incorporeal save for the
trampling anvil of brambles
rambling, rumbling,
pricking against the flesh,
the skin, in it's
folds and ridges,
veins and arteries
underneath and within,
without scandal,
I wriggle and wrangle
Against those thorns,
their tight strangle,
and this incongruous
state of affairs of mine,
for now.

Must get candles.

Outside a country cottage,
where the road trails off like a song,
and the paint of its pebble-dash walls
play off the sky's complexion,
your indifferent eyes behold
the curdling clouds above
and scrutinize the strangers under them;
the expectations met like
a faulty firework firmly
mounted in the Earth.

In the garden stands
a Spaniard perplexed
by the novelty of fog
stranded on the hillside
and the absurdness of it
existing outside of a horror movie.
In the course of
a near imperceptible drizzle,
it seemed that the clouds
forgot how to float;
At other times, elsewhere, a refusal
to be so gentle,
to became fused with other things,
to be born from
the seepage of smoke
of more than a million chimneys,
some slink home through it
holding hand-cranked lamps,
others: smaller, older,
wrapped in white sheets,
cough up a whole city.

But we are not there,
we are outside this worn-out cottage,
where all the white cats have blue eyes,
where a bike rests and rusts on an oak tree,
where incredibility is murmured  
in hushed tones of veiled dialect,
where the conversation tapers off
like a half-learned hymn.

We amble on in.