Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire

Circus on Capitalist Hill (Comey don’t play that…)
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
13 Jun 2017
🖨️ Print Article

by BAR poet in residence Raymond Nat Turner

Big doings this week up there between the War House and the Rogues Garden. Our poet reports on the show, clowns, cloven hooves and all.

 

Circus on Capitalist Hill (Comey don’t play that…)

by BAR poet in residence Raymond Nat Turner

A senile clown questions the wind
Hearing what he’s heard
hundreds of times before:
Step right up, ladies and gentlemen
into the smoke and
mirror swamp, draining
Anything not nailed down

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen
to sideshow puppetry
Millionaire-billionaire buffoonery
Crooked clowns hiding behind corkscrews
Conniving clowns with
cloven hooves and horns
turning fruits of our labor
into ATMs

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen
suspend disbelief,
Don’t follow the money
pay No attention to
1% pickpockets
Working the perimeter

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen
enter the Capitalist Hill,
War House, Rogue Garden,
Offal Office, White
Supreme Court matrix—
Big Top, bleaching brains,
fooling fools and babies
Riding bareback and backwards
on donkeys and elephants
Babbling ‘bout “our democracy”

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen
See the greatest show on turf
pebbles posing as diamonds,
Fascism as ‘democracy’
with redacted rights…

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen
See the clown trick
Un-framing, freeing an Indigenous
Warrior caged four decades

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen
See the clown trick
sliding cells open pneumatically,
Freeing COINTELPRO, Black Power
political prisoners, prisoners of war—

“I didn’t think so— Comey don’t play that…”

Raymond Nat Turner © 2017 All Rights Reserved
Raymond Nat Turndr is an acclaimed poet and performance artist. find much more of his work at http://upsurgejazz.com.

Do you need and appreciate Black Agenda Report articles? Please click on the DONATE icon, and help us out, if you can.


More Stories


  • Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright
    Exorcising AI: The Ghost in the Machine is white “supremacy,” and it Aims to Haunt the World with Human Redundancy, Neocolonialism, and Militarism
    28 Oct 2026
    Reflections on Valerie Veatch's documentary, Ghost in the Machine.
  • Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
    For a neighbor: Hall of Fame Herb
    28 Oct 2026
    "For a neighbor: Hall of Fame Herb" for Herb Boyd from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
  • Francy Natalia Mosquera Garcia , Caroline Shenaz Hossein
    Afro-Colombian Women and the Making of the Black Social Economy
    28 Oct 2026
    Colombia's constitution recognizes Black communities as collective rights-holders, but extractivism and dispossession have undermined those guarantees, inspiring people to build their own…
  • Johari Diata Osei , Dhoruba bin-Wahad
    The Black Panthers Didn't Start in Oakland. The History We Tell Does.
    28 Oct 2026
    The Black Panther Party did not begin in Oakland on October 15, 1966, but emerged from earlier organizing in Harlem and Lowndes County, Alabama. Celebrating only the famous founders erases the…
  • Coleen Littlejohn
    NicaNotes: Historic Solidarity between Nicaragua and Palestine
    28 Oct 2026
    Coleen Littlejohn presente! Our late comrade gave these remarks detailing how Nicaragua and Palestine share a long history of revolutionary internationalist solidarity, demonstrating a shared anti-…
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us