Live Encounters Aotearoa New Zealand Poets & Writers March 2026
Out Walking, poems by Lincoln Jaques.
Out Walking
Remember those haze-fire nights
The light from the full moon stinging
Our eyes the reflection of stars
Staining our eyelids full of tears
when we were young not like now
When our skin has turned from yellow-gold
To nicotine stains our sadness at growing
Old but at least we are together still here
Under the exposed moon shedding on hills
Making us scared of tree-shapes and ghost rocks
Laughing together feeling a braille mortality
Knowing all is illusory and each year is another layer
Removed by a drunken archaeologist with a blunt
Trowel the burden of those decades like a child
On a metronome swing being pushed by an invisible
Force waiting for us to fall which
Will no doubt be soon.
Discovering Bukowski
in Graham Brazier’s Living Room
We were still young. Poetry was yet to awaken
itself within me, like a lotus bloom from the pile
of deep shit that was my life, in those days.
The only thing keeping me going was the books
I read at the time. The Stranger. Down and Out
in Paris and London. The few friends that hadn’t
self-harmed into penal colonies or hanged themselves
or been killed in drunken car jams. When we eventually
came out from the haze of those personal growth years
there was one friend, she worked in the music industry,
making sure the touring groups got their smack
and the groupies were hidden in rear doors, she housesat
Graham Brazier’s villa in Mt Eden, still a colonial wasteland
at the time, late nineties, the rock’n’roll paradise strangled
all the heyday of kiwi pub bands. She invited me over (me
not realising it was Graham Brazier’s house). I sat in his
loungeroom, on a settee where he sat, on the polished
floorboards, his memorabilia hanging from the walls,
leaning in the dusty corners, photographs of him with
the famous. We drank and my friend smoked cigarettes
(inside Graham Brazier’s house!) as she told me stories
about Graham Brazier’s notorious drinking and drug taking
and all this time his songs were playing on the stereo.
He was an avid book collector, Graham Brazier. He grew up
with his mother on Dominion Road where she owned
a bookstore. They lived above. My friend recently sent
me a photo she had of her and Graham Brazier standing
in his mother’s shop, locked in an embrace, the Penguin
First Editions piled up on the shelf. In the loungeroom
where I now sat, I looked at his impressive library.
And there, I plucked down, The Last Night of the Earth
Poems, thinking, what New Age shite is all this? (It
was the nineties). The book dropped open on a short
poem about a luger, about someone placing the luger
to their temple, about the sound of birds being frightened
by the click of the safety catch. And I was stunned. All
of our lives were like a safety catch clicking off, waiting
for the silence that followed, hoping it would be filled in.
Graham, I never met you. But I sat on your settee in your
beautiful house in Mt Eden, and you will never know it
but you introduced me to Bukowski on that fateful night.
I remember driving home, listening to the songlist of
your life: Latin Lover and Blue Lady and Billy Bold.
And Bukowski tucked into the back of my mind.
You saved me.
Setting Moon
(for Pauline Thompson, 1942-2012)
The last time I saw her, I stopped
on the way, bought Birds of Paradise
from a florist on the main road near
her house. Traffic reflected in plate-glass
seemed to melt and move, although
that may have been my tears.
I knew her not as my generation,
but through her daughter, we were close
friends once, having survived
the embattled high school years
together. We’d lost touch. Then I heard
Pauline wanted to see me.
The Birds of Paradise sat in the back seat
aching to fly through the open window.
When I arrived she was crippled in pain.
I searched the room for her tablets. The
house she now lived in was different
but her artworks froze us together in time.
The same style I always remembered: her Pitcairn Island
paintings, The Suzanne Aubert series. Transforming
colour in the world. I thought back then
to her studio, where I was sometimes invited
(discovering later that this was a rare privilege).
She’d discuss with me art, poetry, literature
it took many years to rediscover what I
was a part of, in those days, in that top room
like a Paris Salon, with our own Gertrude Stein
learning more than I ever would in a classroom
staring at half-finished canvases, while the dream
of being a writer was discoloured by the uncollected
consciousness of blue collar disapproval.
In that last visit, I’m not sure she really knew me.
I placed the Birds of Paradise in a vase I found
under the kitchen sink. We sat watching the late
afternoon soaps until her Carer came, a small
nervous woman who eyed me suspiciously. That
time haunts me still, as I got up, said goodbye
the waters rushing at the plate-glass windows, shadows
smothering our breathing, the pain increasing within
her, walking out past the miniatures opening to expansive
narratives of her full life, knowing we’d soon lose another.
© Lincoln Jaques
Lincoln Jaques is a Tāmaki Makaurau based writer. His poetry, fiction, travel essays and book reviews have appeared in collections in Aotearoa and internationally, including Landfall, Live Encounters, The Spinoff Friday Poem, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, Mayhem and takahē. He was shortlisted for the 2023 inaugural I Te Kokoru At The Bay hybrid manuscript awards and was the Runner-Up in the 2022 International Writers’ Workshop Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems. He has been selected for the international 2025 Best Small Fictions anthology from Alternating Current Press.