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


  • Births of a Nation, Redux: Surveying Trumpland with Cedric Robinson
    Robin D.G. Kelley
    Births of a Nation, Redux: Surveying Trumpland with Cedric Robinson
    18 Nov 2020
    What Robinson identified as “the rewhitening of America” a century ago is what we’re seeing play out today.
  • Global Africa’s Mission: Out-Think and Out-Maneuver Stupid, Violent Imperialists
    Mark P. Fancher
    Global Africa’s Mission: Out-Think and Out-Maneuver Stupid, Violent Imperialists
    18 Nov 2020
    AFRICOM is designed to do only one thing well, and that is to kill Africans.  “Global Africa must find a way to eliminate the AFRICOM threat.”
  • BAR Book Forum: David Vine’s “The United States of War”
    Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
    BAR Book Forum: David Vine’s “The United States of War”
    18 Nov 2020
    American warfare has been waged almost exclusively against people of color, dating to independence and 1492.
  • BAR Book Forum: Pamela Ayo Yetunde and Cheryl A. Giles’s “Black and Buddhist”
    Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
    BAR Book Forum: Pamela Ayo Yetunde and Cheryl A. Giles’s “Black and Buddhist”
    18 Nov 2020
    Activists and community organizers have never known the precariousness of the threats they face today.
  • Sanctions Against Venezuela Will Continue Under Biden
    Vijay Prashad
    Sanctions Against Venezuela Will Continue Under Biden
    18 Nov 2020
    There is every indication that a Biden administration will maintain the punitive sanctions against Venezuela, suffocating the country during the pandemic. 
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us