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
  • omnibus

Embassy crawlers, kidnappers, Butchers and Boss Tweet…
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
15 May 2019
🖨️ Print Article
standoff at the Venezuelan embassy
Standoff at the Venezuelan embassy

“The receiving State is under a special duty to take all appropriate steps to protect the premises of the mission against any intrusion or damage and to prevent any disturbance of the peace of the mission or impairment of its dignity.”
— Article 22 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, 1961.

Whistles blowing, sirens blaring through bullhorns,
strobe lights flashing to pounding, banging rhythms
It must be the embassy medieval thugs mistook
for a butcher shop—or the one thugs entered to
kidnap towering truth-teller?

Instead, evening’s infested with
pot and pan-banging blue arm bands, Assault-Right
hipsters with Hitler haircuts; choreographed from
The War House and Capitalist Hill.

Ordinarily, big banner headlines splash
Post, Times, Wall Street Journal:
Americans Holed up in Foreign Embassy
surrounded by secret police blocking food,
medicine, supplies; shutting off electricity,
assaulting, arresting peaceful protestors:
Replacing rule of law with Law of Jungle;
Violating Vienna Convention, abdicating
responsibility
to
protect…

Ordinarily, Fox-box foot-soldiers/State Department
stenographers are on the ground grindin’— 24/7
with talking heads hopping mad—shit-fit, send-
in-the Marines-mad—for Boeing’s war of the week
versus strongman who became the wrong man!
Rogue state with redacted 1st and 4th amendments,
we wait for wet, cold, Wikileak words: “Live from New
York, it’s Saturday…”

© 2019. Raymond Nat Turner, The Town Crier. All Rights Reserved.
Our poet in residence Raymond Nat Turner is an acclaimed performning artist, educator and an oficial of the National Writers Union.
Find much more of his work at http://upsurgejazz.com.

Venezuela

Do you need and appreciate Black Agenda Report articles? Please click on the DONATE icon, and help us out, if you can.


More Stories


  • LA Protest
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Los Angeles Protests, Immigration, and Black Politics
    20 Jun 2025
    Thandisizwe Chimurenga is a Los Angeles-based journalist and host of RootWork, which can also be seen on Black Liberation Media’s YouTube channel. She joins us to discuss the recent protests in…
  • Break the Chains
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Breaking the Chains in Swaziland
    20 Jun 2025
    Our guests are Titus Vilakati of the Break the Chains Campaign, which calls for the release of political prisoners in the southern African nation of Swaziland and the end of human rights abuses…
  • Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    Tell Congress, No War on Iran!
    18 Jun 2025
    If Trump asks congress for approval to wage a war on Iran, he will probably get it.
  • Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    ESSAY: Iran And Beyond: Total War Is Still On The Horizon, Glen Ford, 2007
    18 Jun 2025
    “So they go forward with the old plan, the only one they've got. Attack Iran.”
  • Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
    Somaliland, US Ally in the New Cold War
    18 Jun 2025
    Somaliland aspires to be an “independent” US military enclave in the Horn of Africa.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us