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 Masses Not Yet Sold on Defunding the Police
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Black Masses Not Yet Sold on Defunding the Police
    08 Dec 2020
    Lawrence Grandpre, research director for the Baltimore-based activist organization “Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle,” agrees in principle with the demand for defunding police but d
  •  Reparations Not Yet a “Mainstream” Demand
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Reparations Not Yet a “Mainstream” Demand
    08 Dec 2020
    Reparations “hasn’t reached the point where there’s really a discussion among white politicians” on the merits of the issue, said Zuri Arman Kent-Smith, a writer and activist with
  •  Beware Biden-Harris Neoliberalism
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford , Rebecca Ann Wilcox
    Beware Biden-Harris Neoliberalism
    08 Dec 2020
    Corporate Democrats may be more dangerous than overt racists, because neoliberals “cloak themselves in the rhetoric of ‘racial uplift,’” said Rebecca Ann Wilcox, a community organi
  • BLM Chapters Demand “Accountability” from Trio that Cashed in on the Movement
    Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
    BLM Chapters Demand “Accountability” from Trio that Cashed in on the Movement
    03 Dec 2020
    Ten chapters of the national Black Lives Matter organization are in open revolt against the individuals that have treated the mass movement as their personal vehicle for upward political, prof
  • Ethiopia: Civil War and Nation Building in the 21st Century
    Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
    Ethiopia: Civil War and Nation Building in the 21st Century
    02 Dec 2020
    In light of the Ethiopian central government’s military clash with regional forces in Tigray province, Ann Garrison speaks with a member of the Oromo people, the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us