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angelus-novus-de-paul-klee-y-retrato-de-walter-benjamin 

I’m out of luck again

And out of inspiration,

And Lenin is on his train

To the Finland station.

He knows what he’s doing

He knows what’s to be done,

And here I am still

Standing on the platform.

*

I feel the lure

Of the suburbs calling,

To be simple to be wise

A bartender - pretender

Living out his life

Without a hope or a prayer,

Season by season,

Here now invincibly

Without rhyme or reason.

 

But the rhyme and reason

Keep the locomotives  coming.

And the need to arrive somewhere

Goes ahead of everything  

 

The young poet

Walking out

Into the Finnish lake,

Another in the mental asylum

Too early far too late,

One  I admired counting out

His final days in cigarettes.

And my mentor buried alive each night

Recalling it all in the morning…

 

And then it  hits me like a train:

 

If everyone heads nowhere

Why am I so jealous?

What is the hurry to win?

Life is not a race across a field

Or a script being written by God,

There is no rhyme or reason

But the luggage you bring

When the train has already

Pulled out of  the station.

 

*

 

It doesn’t end;

The light-bulbs to be changed. Bed mites

In my pillow. Tides milling the shore.

They never end.

Car hire lease payments.

The fatuousness of fame. Replication of

Cancer cells. The best dying young:

The worst getting their own

Newspaper columns. Summer nights heavy

With the smell of bad barbecues:

Autumn with diesel, spring with cocaine.

It never ends. Idiots in the chancellery. Control freaks

In their driving seats. The plunder of the forests.

The selfishness of plankton. Suspicious border guards.

The questions and evasions.

Insects thriving. Continents colliding.

Mothers screaming at their kids.

Lovers arguing  in the streets….

They will never end.

 

But this

At least

Is finished.

 

 

 

In Memoriam Tony Judt 2009

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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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