…For Brother Glen
“When an elder dies, a library burns to the ground…”
—African proverb (gender-adjusted)
I.
No bald “Build Back Better” slogans for
a burned Bruce library—
a Glen library gone—Pick up the ashes,
Carry on… spreading them on new crops…
II.
I couldn’t breathe…
black cat dander, goober dust, rabbit foot
spook-ism; viral droplets of Madison Ave.
messaging: “Yes, we Can and bottle Jim
Jones Juice for regime Change you can
believe in…”
I couldn’t breathe…
droplets of dung from charlatans riding
bareback/backwards on donkeys
Every 2-4 years—Trapping Negroz in pigment
of their imaginations—whooping, hollering,
Happy dancing on ice…for The Audacity of Dope
I couldn’t breathe…
Ecstasy/rhapsody of nodding icons—swept up
in rapture of Kool-Aided colonial euphoria—
Mentors becoming bus brutes when facts f-up
their highs…
I couldn’t breathe…
quarantined, on timeout, socially-distanced, isolated;
Unappreciated—wasting away out West—killing me
softly for my words, my poem “**The Coming of Christ”
Yet, one slow blues Saturday a steel, velvet-wrapped
Voice of spirit-stirring
North Star stripe issued from the radio snapping me
to attention!
It possessed thunderous timbre—Freedom’s Journal,
Liberator, Emancipator tone snatching my collar!
It held Douglass DNA infecting my marrow! It had
Shedded—reading newswire copy on-the-air at age 11—
it harnessed horsepower even the Godfather of Soul
had to “Say it loud!” when rechristening it: “Ford!”
Ida B-like it commanded KPFA’s colossal signal—
showering ice-cold Wikileaks over 1/3 of the Golden
State
It flared up in hot blue flames melting masks of mis-
leaders guarding freezers stuffed with corporate cash…
It possessed laser precision—surgically removing word
walls metastasized in the mind of a slutty professor; And
Taught lil’ Negroz in Teddy P-tones,“You gotta let him go,
if he looks like another Booker TKO—Or, more effective Evil!”
And it crescendoed from studios, stages, street corners, churches,
bookstores, bars, lecture halls, flatbed trucks—speaking truth to
The People
igniting conscious explosions with its 4 word fuses:
“POWER TO THE PEOPLE!!”
“POWER TO THE PEOPLE!!”
Well done, Brother! May the Ancestors be pleased
with you kneeling near the 7 mounds; saluting the
7 trees guarding them on African Burial Ground; as
You leave Lower Manhattan, seeing Sun Ra, Saturn/beyond…
**https://youtu.be/XfHYkoMUOk4
© 2021. Raymond Nat Turner, The Town Crier. All Rights Reserved.
Shangri-La—untaxed, socially-distanced champagne- caviar, Cayman Island, yacht crowds who Pay nothing for water washing their waste to sewage
Bell levels a class critique against the Black bourgeoisie, whom he sees as having led Black political protest down the wrong path time and time again.
French bullying of Africa has been driven entirely by self-interest and greed.
This book analyzes Early Modern English Drama as a form of cultural production in which the paradigm of Early Modern England was shifting to account for encounters with black Africans.
Ideological exclusion and deportation from the United States, and how they has been consistently used as tools of political repression.
