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


  • Black Agenda Radio for week of March 30, 2020
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Black Agenda Radio for week of March 30, 2020
    30 Mar 2020
    COVID-19 May Trigger a “Crisis of Legitimacy”
  • Mumia: Things Fall Apart
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Mumia: Things Fall Apart
    30 Mar 2020
    Citing the novel by Chinua Achebe, political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal notes: “We see outside our doors, our windows, a world we did not know, that now exists.
  • Can Black Marxists Imagine the Unimaginable?
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Can Black Marxists Imagine the Unimaginable?
    30 Mar 2020
    “There’s always something new that we couldn’t anticipate,” said Minkah Makalani, professor of African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
  • Bernie Sanders’ Socialism Isn’t the Real Thing
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Bernie Sanders’ Socialism Isn’t the Real Thing
    30 Mar 2020
    When North Carolina writer and activist Joshua Briond was introduced to the words, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” he knew that Be
  • COVID-19 May Trigger a “Crisis of Legitimacy”
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    COVID-19 May Trigger a “Crisis of Legitimacy”
    30 Mar 2020
    Can the corporate state hold, “or will it collapse under the weight of mass opposition and mass ‘distancing’ from the authority of the state?” asks Duboisian scholar Dr Anthony Monteir
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us