Live Encounters Aotearoa New Zealand Poets & Writers March 2026
Requiem, poems by Tim Wilson.
Requiem
We were in a room lined with taxidermy tiger, eagle and Moose heads, all shot.
The Moose had been strengthened to
hold SAS guys who, after drinks, would ride her, meters above the floor.
We sipped our grief, having just farewelled
one of their own, eulogised by his son via YouTube
from Covid-stricken New Jersey.
Military posture prevailed. Details from secret missions
were omitted and inferred. That time they were found in the jungle,
drunk on Gurkha rum. Or crashing the Auster, while transporting Santa.
‘Nessun dorma…’ sang an opera star, ‘Let no-one sleep’.
A plane buzzed us, lost, just before the 21-gun salute. The last Post
played inconclusively.
Leaving the military, he went and stayed
sober, spent the last 17 years of his working life counselling
alcoholics, addicts and prisoners in places like Tokoroa.
In the mess, over cups of tea and flammenwerfer-ed savories, Andy recognized me,
and we discussed Kiwi bodies failing to return from the Malayan insurgency.
Above us, the Moose wept at an era’s passing, also its masculinity.
Few cocktails are stronger than absence or nostalgia.
We need more, always more.
Driving back from the base I phoned a deputy-principal who decades ago scolded,
‘You know what you’re against, one day you’ll have to decide what you’re for.’
He wasn’t home.
Introduction to My As-Yet Unpublished Poetry Collection
Initially these poems were pitched to the agencies as
a Facebook page with 240K likes. How likeable, really?
They knew it, themselves, waiting to be born:
gap-toothed, self-possessed, forlorn.
Their features aren’t Instagram symmetrical, their
besetting tendency? Semi-hysterical.
Big conversations play in their heads
but they end up doing the gag about the four-foot pianist.
A Polaroid of my soul, ejected from your Land camera.
Bullied on X, their peers think they’re dicks.
Rarely asked out…And when they are, they say stuff like,
‘No Eros without Theos.’
Before leaving the house, they ventured three outfits,
which remain crumpled on the mouldy Axminster.
Fat-backed, slope-shouldered,
varicose veiny; nude and proud and sullen;
humming Tower of Song by Leonard Cohen:
Poems with more moles than body hair.
Poems nursing hurts, and a warming splinter of Lindauer.
Poems dying for someone (anyone) to sidle over, be a bit true
or even a friend.
You are?!
Um… may I borrow that red pen?
Twelve Signs You’re A Dad
5. Spot-cleaning, you can’t resist the Chux multicloth, flicking your
tongue into iridescence. Your children are ice creams melting selfishness.
4. It goes everywhere: over your wife, the stairs, the leather couch obtained on Black
Friday from Target, the igloo where you used to crouch.
3. A bedside lullaby: ‘Don’t turn out like me.’
2. But, they are…
© Tim Wilson
Tim Wilson lives in Auckland with his wife and their four boys. The other day he opened the bonnet of their SUV to discover a nerf gun bullet in a ventilation grate; he finds poems in much the same way.