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%AM, %23 %056 %1999 %00:%Jun

Palace of Tears

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There are no more border guards
In the palace of tears
No bugging devices
No eavesdropping spies
Trying to find out if you're defecting
To the decadent West.

Now you can rent a car
Drive it to Moscow or Milan
Buy gift wrapped chocolate
Tread on marble floors
Extract your cash from a swift machine
In the palace of tears

Bodies which together
Seemed so light
Floating above each other
Here take flight
Hearts unravelling like barbed wire
In the palace of tears

I could say to myself
Time spent together goes so fast
Before we know it -
So will the time apart
Me waiting in arrivals
You coming through the gate

But the airline soap removes your smell
I can't remember the last few days at all
Like dipping my pen in frozen ink
Or touching fingers
Through frosted glass
In the palace of tears

Peter Jukes, Traenenpalast Berlin 1999

The Traenenpalast (Palace of Tears) is now a theatre. However, this was once the site of real-life dramas... The Traenenpalast was part of a border checkpoint when the city of Berlin was divided, and the glass and metal pavilion was named after the tearful partings between visitors from the West and citizens of the East who had to stay behind.



Read 4895 times Last modified on %AM, %24 %155 %2011 %02:%Sep
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Over the last few years I've created some attention with my live coverage of the phone hacking trial in London, the most expensive and longest concluded criminal trial in British history. There are various accounts and articles about this on the web, including a radio play. My Twitter feed can be found here, and a collation of evidence from the trial, and all my live tweets, can be found at my Fothom Wordpress blog. There's also a Flipboard magazine and a Facebook Page. My Klout ranking is here.

More Journalism and Books

Various journalistic articles of mine are scattered throughout the web. There's some kind of portfolio at Muckrack. The most extensive reporting is for the Daily Beast and Newsweek, but there's more at the New Statesman, the New Republic, Aeon etc. I have two non fiction books published in the last year: The Fall of the House of Murdoch, available through Unbound or Amazon, and Beyond Contempt: the Inside Story of the Phone Hacking Trial, available via Canbury Press or also on Amazon. I am currently contributing to a new site for open source journalism, called Bellingcat, and advisor (along with Sir Harry Evans and Bill Emmott) to an exciting new crowdfunded journalism startip Byline

Getting in Contact

My generic email is my first name at peterjukes.com. That should get through to me pretty quickly. My Linked In profile is here. For non journalistic inquiries, for television stage and film, contact Howard Gooding at Judy Daish Associates. Examples of my television work can be found on IMDB. This links to the site for my forthcoming musical, Mrs Gucci. My radio plays can be found in various audiobook formats on Amazon and elsewhere.

 

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