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.
The protests spreading across Spain, India, France, Chile, and other countries are responses to the global neoliberal order of austerity, privatization, and deregulation.
Under the guise of a farcical “pilot zone” project to restore Lebanon’s sovereignty, Israel is pursuing a scorched-earth strategy while entrenching its occupation.
Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Honduras, Peru, and Costa Rica have all elected right-wing presidents in the past year, and most are open Trump allies. Brazil's runoff between Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro is…
October 7, 2023, was not an isolated attack, but the culmination of generations of Palestinian imprisonment and resistance in Gaza, comparable to Nat Turner's rebellion. History will record the Al…
The 2026 French uprising is a continuation of the anti-colonial struggle, rooted in the 1961 Paris massacre of Algerians and the ongoing neocolonial relationship between France and its former…
