And did she look across the distance with dismay
When banished to the heatless edge of space?
And would the jealous earth not let her turn away
Or hide that cry still frozen on her face?

Behold her now, cheeks cracked, mouth wide with pain
Trying to bury herself in the dark again.

Peter Jukes 1982

You thought I was a poor poet

The first time that we met,

Upset to discover

The catastrophe of success

As soon as you walked in

You knew there was something wrong

Something has to give here

Someone

A poor poet has to lose it

Sell his soul for a song

Possessed and dispossessed

Before - to long

But what they never told you

Is you would pay the price

Abandoned so I could recover

My voice

For a poet is born

Of things that are not

From losses not from profits 

And you were the cost. 

You thought I was a poor poet

The first time that we met

Upset to discover

The catastrophe of success

You can't buy truth

You can't buy love

You can't buy this

But maybe you can earn it.

Some images are so striking
They penetrate the memory
Before they enter the eye...

A book with a cover
Of the Man in the Moon reading a
Book with the cover with the Man
In the Moon reading...

Or
The Hand of God
Creating fish beast fowl
Drawn by
The hand of a child.*

Peter Jukes 1995

* This is actually a personal memory from about the age of five, when I was asked to draw the creation scene in school. But I also found this once on the internet

Drawing God

A kindergarten teacher was observing her classroom of children while they drew. She would occasionally walk around to see each child's artwork. As she got to one little girl who was working diligently, she asked what the drawing was.

The girl replied, "I'm drawing God."

The teacher paused and said, "But no one knows what God looks like."

Without missing a beat, or looking up from her drawing the girl replied, 'They will in a minute."

-author unknown

This is shattered fragment of a stumbleupon blog, long since now defunct, where I used to store favourite images, and attach poems to them (or vice versa). Just goes to show that for all its claims of ubiquity, the digital domain doesn't give you much of a purchase in permanence. 

PeterJukes's reviews

73 reviews of peterjukes Help Search

Looking down the barrel of Chapman's gun
Lennon was unaccountably struck
By a surge of happiness for this world
No two moments the same no two things
The hydrants outside the Plaza, pigeons
In Central Park, the magnificence
Lost, found or made, the way
Two guitars can sing together and alone.
Life. Beauty. Music. The tracks he had to cut.
Lennon was in love with all of it.
And then the bullet hit.

Peter Jukes 1988

I was happy
Playing 
My part

She fired
A sliver
Of ice into my heart

I shrugged it off
I danced
I laughed
The ice went deeper
Into my heart

I worried at it
I picked I squeezed
My punctured heart
Began to bleed

So I ran away
And ran so fast
It stabbed me every 
Beat of my heart

I went to sleep
And overnight
My heart had hardened
Into ice

So now I'm famous
For my emptiness
I am a suitor
Of the ice empress

Peter Jukes 1987

The following images are some slightly faded snaps from my year living in India in the early 80s 

CHAOS

Now a windless haze suppresses 
The accolade of the streets

Sacred cows graze in traffic
Battered buses, rickshaws, bikes

An elephant lit up with electric bulbs 
A man balancing aluminium chairs on his head

In the fields the chorus of mud-frogs never cease
The ears are filled but not with noise

Peter Jukes India 1983

Images by Alyssa Monks

Together
Or 
Apart

Much easier to see
Just one dilemma
In the frame of forever
See it now

Together
Or
Apart

But unpick the words
Suspect the simplicity

Apart could be
Communing despite miles
A constant presence
Like a subtitle in your life
Apart could be
The meaning you hold
Like two strings vibrating
To the same note

Unpick the words

Together might mean
Cleaving down the middle 
Inseparable as a wound
Dependent as enemies
Demanding as
A beggar's bowl
Imploring the pennies
That make you poor

Unpick the meaning, unpack the words
Go beyond the dilemma

See us both 
Standing here

And listen to the world
Beneath the footsteps
And murmur of voices
And the passing cars
The world is so quiet
So quiet

And we have to keep
Ourselves
Together

And stop
Being
A part

Peter Jukes 1999

UPDATE: this site might be a bit quiet for the next few months as I act as the Newsweek/DailyBeast correspondent on the Leveson Inquiry and the ongoing News International revelations unfolding in London. I'll try to cross reference as and when I can, but my work can be followed by clicking the picture - or the link above. 

As the Prospect Piece about the Obama Campaign in 2008 explains, I've been increasingly involved in the political blogosphere, especially in the US, for several years now. That's partly out of political passion, but also a sense of drama: I've discovered some of the best one-liners for my dramas - and a raft of amusing Lulz Images - while debating in the political blogosphere.

My main work/entertainment can be found here:

   1. Sorealism - originally the crazy spoof art movement cooked up with Marcos D'Cruze, this is a new website holding my collaborative work with him, and basically sporting some nice graphics at the moment, and not much else. 

   2. Daily Kos - where I blog under the name Brit. My most popular series of 'diaries' has been a sequence about Hackgate called 'The Fall of the House of Murdoch'. You can see a lot of these stories and many others in the same mould by fellow 'Kossacks' by following the FOTHOM tag which I created. 

      3. Motley Moose - a site I designed and co-founded with a group of Americans during the latter phases of the Obama campaign. There I'm also an administrator and Frontpager

 4. Labourlist - the leading British Labour supporting blogsite - where I have contributed several articles, focused on the Arab Spring, the rise of the EDL and the problem of Islamophobia

 I don't pretend to be a proper political activist, or particularly informed about news and current affairs. However I do believe in online advocacy, citizen journalism, and the capacity for all of us to become involved either by fundraising, spreading news and awareness, or merely having our minds opened by political debate: as I explain in this piece.

5. Meanwhile, some of these various crowd-sourced blogs have come together under the banner of Unbound where my Fall of the House of Murdoch series of diaries are looking for crowd funding for the book Bad Press about Hackgate and the exposure of the Murdoch empire, richly illustrated by Eric Lewis. Please support the project if you can - at only £5 for a named dedicated e-book. 

Apart from a series of dramatic sketches on Newsnight during the 1992 election, The Chief was my first broadcast TV.  . 

 I have no idea how many episodes I wrote of these two series, and the quality is probably mixed. Though I'd never, at this point, wanted to write cop shows, The Chief was different thanks to its creator Jeffrey Kane, who taught me how to write pugnacious polticised narrative. The other inspiration was the show's  advisor, John Alderson, who had formulated the liberal idea idea of community policing.  He taught me that the idea of a constable was not someone with special powers, but merely a citizen nominated by other citizens to protect the community Working with him, getting to read Thomas Paine and understanding some of the long fought battles for individual liberty, was a real education and I created an episode, based on the story of Giovanni Falcone, partly inspired by John's almost saintly quality of probity and kindness.