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


  • Biden-Harris Look Ready to Keep U.S. In Afghanistan—Say No!
    Black Alliance For Peace
    Biden-Harris Look Ready to Keep U.S. In Afghanistan—Say No!
    07 Apr 2021
    The new Democratic administration seems determined to sabotage an agreement to end the “longest war.”
  • MLK Was a Radical Who Hated Not Only Racial Subordination But Class Exploitation
    Sylvie Laurent, interviewed by Arvind Dilawar
    MLK Was a Radical Who Hated Not Only Racial Subordination But Class Exploitation
    07 Apr 2021
    King explicitly linked the value of human dignity to the material conditions necessary to enable people to live a decent life.
  • Letters from Our Readers
    by Jahan Choudhry, Comments Editor
    Letters from Our Readers
    07 Apr 2021
    In "On Anarchism and Black Revolution" Peter James Hudson examines the historical roots of critiques of anarchism and its relationship to Black liberation movements.
  • BAR Book Forum: Short Meditations on Christina Sharpe’s “In the Wake”
    Troizel Carr
    BAR Book Forum: Short Meditations on Christina Sharpe’s “In the Wake”
    07 Apr 2021
    Being in the wake, in the afterlives of slavery…is to be caught in the reverberating aftermath of a long disaster, a durational dance with danger, with terror.
  • BAR Book Forum: Amandla Thomas-Johnson’s “Becoming Kwame Ture”
    Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
    BAR Book Forum: Amandla Thomas-Johnson’s “Becoming Kwame Ture”
    07 Apr 2021
    The Stokely Carmichael of the 60s continued to politically and ideologically evolve while in Africa where he adopts the names of his political mentors Sekou Toure and Kwame Nkrumah. 
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us