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.

He came from nowhere
The Green Belt boy
Sitting in his little room
In his little house

Watching the sun set
Over his own small world

Him and his Big Ideas

Peter Jukes 1982

 There’s a nasty bug doing the rounds. Like a computer virus it occupies apparently innocuous spaces, then starts replicating itself at amazing speed spawning logical contradictions that eventually bring the system shuddering to a halt. Fortunately, the symptoms are easy to spot. If words like ‘seduction’ ‘simulation’, ‘decentred individual’ and ‘posthumanism’ randomly flash across the page, you know you’ve found the bug of post modernism.

Neither Mark Dery’s Escape Velocity nor Shelly Turkle’s ‘Life on the Screen’ are free from this virulent force. Both claim to explore the cultural impact of the ‘digital revolution’, and yet rely on the prescriptions of Baudrillard, Jameson and Lacan - theorists who main contributions were relevant to the mass media of ten or twenty years ago, rather than the multimedia industry today.

I know the force of words, their urgent calling...

Seee the full poem here