Peter Richards

Pictures at an Exhibition of the Apocalypse

#1 The Cover to the Guidebook

Love loses credit in the time of war.
No one jokes about the heart’s disease.
Victims of violence, isolated, starved
of love, need recompense, or so they say
and all the discontented horses ride
out together, getting in at the death.

A minute’s silence is the song of death.
There’s never any prize for winning war.
Antagonists, are taken for a ride
by their own credulousness, the disease
of buying what the rumourmongers say
until emaciated consciences are starved

like the lands they left behind are starved
in the infertile country that is death.
The voice of aftermath has nothing to say.
The weak and stateless cannot go to war.
Movers and shakers fear, like a disease,
angry hikers hoping for a ride.

It’s irritating, begging for a ride
and being shunned, made angry, starved
of affection, avoided as though disease
grew out of your life and lonesome death.
Another drafted bum sent off to war,
beats paying you welfare, wouldn’t you say?

Whoever soldiers kill, they have no say.
They’re there to do it, not just for the ride.
History may later call it war
or not. They’re ignorant and wise; starved
of society but close to death,
protected practically from disease

because a healthy army makes disease
work for it. When you hear the order, say
Yes Sir! then go out and deliver death.
Be right behind them when the horsemen ride,
heed no bleatings from the huddled, starved
poor. Obey your orders, be a dog of war.

Clouds of diseased illusion ride
where people say they are not starved
in choice of death, or spoils of war.


#2 The Cubist Impression

A triangular vision, the angel of death
all lit up by the sepia searchlights that ride
on the lines of remembering what neurons say
when the mystical objects all fade from our starved
recollection, looks on as the doors of disease
open wide on the pestilent corpses of war.

In the green sylvan valley a theatre of war
has grown over and over as life springs from death
and as sympathy’s symphonic choir of disease
brings cadavers to mulch where the scavengers ride
their grim luck on the rails running over the starved
fields of plenty to come but with nothing to say

because now empty pockets hear loosened tongues say
‘I can move’ with the same voice that took them to war.
The cathedrals are empty, the sad spirits starved
of belief in the purpose of life before death.
In the fairground of evening the carouselles ride
by default, making life a surviving disease.

In the palour of morning a wave of disease
by the cold light of evidence no one will say
they have witnessed, envelopes the ones who would ride
the unrideable storm of denial of war.
It is not for the living to know so much death.
A bare plate of porcelain howls out, empty and starved.

Flat lines scream on the bare fields of yesterday, starved
of their husbandry – chalices poisoning even disease
until nothing’s more quiet, no shadow is darker than death.
When the songs that they sing and the things that they say
turn to action, the sands and the seas are at war
and the mythical horsemen don’t choose, they just ride.

A descending staircase in the nude fall of pride.
Deux personnes et un chien devant crackling skin carved
out of driftwood. Sunbeams inaugurate more.
On a seascape of sail shapes a kite flies at ease.
The white horses are spindrifters not making hay
after war, after pestilence, famine and death.

Broken images ride, health is prey to disease.
If we can’t feed the starved, we can hear what they say
when there’s love after war, when there’s life before death.