Felix Dennis' odes to vice and consequences

60,288 views ・ 2009-06-05

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00:12
"The Better Man."
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I was the better at getting and keeping.
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You were the better at spend and spend;
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I was the better at grubbing and heaping,
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But who was the better man in the end?
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Yes, who was the better man, my friend?
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You were the better with lords and ladies,
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I was the better at pillaging Troy;
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You were the better at kissing the babies,
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I was the better at search and destroy.
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But who was the better man, old boy?
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Who was the better man?
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I was the better at improvisation,
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You were the better at spinning the plates;
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I was the better at procrastination,
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01:10
You were the better at quiet debate.
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But who was the better man, old mate?
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Who was the better man?
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You were the better at rolling a reefer,
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I was the better at coke and rum;
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01:28
Remember that night on the beach in Ibiza?
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01:32
The Maori twins
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with the tattooed bum?
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But who was the better man, old chum?
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Who was the better man?
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Now we come down to it, relatives grieving.
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Out in the hall with their crocodile tears;
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Now that you're out of it, now that you're leaving,
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Now that they've sealed your arse and your ears,
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What I've been meaning to tell you for years,
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And years, and years, and years, old friend ...
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Is that you were the better man, in the end;
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02:11
You were the better man,
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My friend.
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02:18
(Applause)
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I wrote this next poem for my mother.
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Every one of us had a mother,
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only one --
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probably the most important person in your life,
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if you're lucky enough to know them.
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My mother was certainly the most important in mine.
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Let me try and describe her to you.
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She's 86 years old. She's frail.
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White, platinum hair.
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Why do they do that? Why do old ladies go to those hair shops,
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and make those helmets?
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03:01
(Laughter)
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Bright as a button. All the ducks in a row.
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Looks like a much prettier version
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of Margaret Thatcher,
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(Laughter)
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but without any of the soft bits in Margaret's character.
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03:17
(Laughter)
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I wrote this poem for her. These are not my beliefs.
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But my mother has lived by this creed
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all her life.
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"Never Go Back."
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Never go back. Never go back.
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Never return to the haunts of your youth.
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Keep to the track, to the beaten track;
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Memory holds all you need of the truth.
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Never look back. Never look back.
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Never succumb to the gorgon's stare.
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Keep to the track, to the beaten track;
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No-one is waiting and nothing is there.
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Never go back. Never go back.
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04:07
Never surrender the future you earned.
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Keep to the track, to the beaten track;
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Never return to the bridges you've burned.
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04:18
Never look back. Never look back.
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04:21
Never retreat to the 'glorious past.'
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Keep to the track, to the beaten track;
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04:27
Treat every day of your life as your last.
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Never go back. Never go back.
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Never acknowledge the ghost on the stair.
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Keep to the track, to the beaten track;
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No-one is waiting and nothing is there.
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04:51
(Applause)
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Now ladies and gentlemen, I'm up on me hobbyhorse.
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If every commercially minded cosmetic surgeon
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were tied end to end along a railroad track,
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that would be me,
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stoking the train
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without a qualm in the world.
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Ladies, don't do it.
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Don't do it.
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You think we want you to do it, but we don't want you to do it.
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Stop it.
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Tell them to go to hell.
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You bodies are wonderful as they are.
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Just leave them alone.
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05:31
"To a Beautiful Lady of a Certain Age."
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Lady lady, do not weep.
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05:39
What is gone is gone. Now sleep.
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Turn your pillow. Dry your tears.
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05:47
Count thy sheep and not thy years.
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Nothing good can come of this.
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Time rules all, my dearest.
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'Tis but folly to be waging war
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On one who never lost before.
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Lady, this is all in vain.
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Youth can never come again;
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We have drunk the summer wine.
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None can make a stitch in time.
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Nip and tuck till crack of doom.
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What is foretold in the womb
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May not be foresworn with gold.
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Nor may time be bought or sold.
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Dearest, do I love thee less?
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Do I shrink from thy caress?
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Think you I could cease to care?
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06:41
Never was there one so fair!
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06:45
Lady lady, do not weep --
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06:47
What is gone is gone. Now sleep.
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06:52
Lean against me, calm your fears,
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Count thy blessings, not thy years.
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07:03
(Applause)
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07:11
America, ladies and gentlemen, has done more for me financially than Britain
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ever has, or ever could have done.
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I was born in Britain, as you have probably guessed.
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Even when on its worst behavior,
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I find myself automatically defending the USA
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from the sneers of green-eyed Europhiles
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playing their Greek card to Roman trumps.
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America is an empire.
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07:36
I hope you know that now.
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All empires, by definition, are bumbling,
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shambolic, bullying, bureaucratic affairs,
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as certain of the rightness of their cause in infancy,
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as they are corrupted by power in their dotage.
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I am no historian, ladies and gentlemen.
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But it seems to be that the USA's sins,
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compared to those of many previous empires,
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are of a more moderate,
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if more pervasive, kind.
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08:13
Let me put this bluntly.
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If Americans are so fat,
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stupid and ignorant,
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my dear friends from Birmingham,
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how come they rule the world?
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08:26
"Hail to the Gods of America."
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Hail to the Gods of America!
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Hail to the gods of the dream.
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Invictus E Pluribus Unum.
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But which of them reigns supreme?
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Which is America's Jupiter?
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The Brahmins of Capital Hill?
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A sorcerer's profit on Wall Street?
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They eye of a dollar bill?
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Or is it celebrity status?
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The worship of those we hate.
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Or the cult of living forever,
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If only we'd watch our weight.
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What of the titans of media?
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Or Hollywood's siren call?
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What of the temples of justice,
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Whose servants enslave us all?
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What of the Brand and the Label?
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What of the upstart Sport?
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And what of the Constitution,
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That bully of last resort?
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Hail to the God of America,
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Whose power the masses extol --
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Convenience rules America;
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Convenience owns our soul.
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Aye, that it does.
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(Applause)
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And if you would like to know why I am not a father --
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I, who by a miracle have 22 godchildren --
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the answer is in this poem,
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which upsets me every time I read it.
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"Love Came to Visit Me."
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Love came to visit me,
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shy as a fawn.
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But finding me busy,
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she fled, with the dawn.
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At 20 the torch of resentment was lit.
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My rage at injustice
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waxed hot as the pits.
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The flux of its lava cleared all in its path.
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Comrades and enemies fled from its wrath.
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Yet lovers grew wary, once novelty waned
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To lie with a bloody man,
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his terror unfeigned.
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At 30 my powers seemed mighty to me.
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The fruits of my rivals, I shook from the tree.
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By guile and by bluster,
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by night and by day,
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I battered and scattered the fools from my way.
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And women grew willing to sham and to bluff.
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Their trinkets and baubles cost little enough.
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From 40 to 50, grown easy and sly,
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I wined them and dined them, like pigs in a sty.
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We feasted and reveled and rutted in muck,
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Forgetting our peril, forgetting to duck,
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Forgetting times arrows are sharper than knives.
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Grown sick to our stomachs,
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and sick of our lives.
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Love came to visit me,
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shy as a fawn.
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But finding me busy,
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she fled with the dawn.
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(Applause)
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Um, there are --
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I've got far too much money and I have far too much fun
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in my businesses.
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So poetry came as a complete shock to me, ladies and gentlemen.
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A complete shock. I was a little ill.
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Okay, I was ill.
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Okay, I had a life-threatening illness, you know.
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I was in a clinic. I wasn't allowed to make telephone calls.
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I wasn't allowed to see any of my -- you know, whatever.
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So, in the end I begged a pack of Post-it notes off a nurse.
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And from another nurse, I begged a pencil, pen.
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And I didn't know what else to do. So I started to write poetry.
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That was in October of 2000.
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I'm not an evil man.
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But sometimes I try to put myself in an evil man's position.
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I'm not a glorious and fantastic-looking woman,
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who men fall down, you know, when she walks in a room.
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But sometimes I try to put myself in that position.
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(Laughter)
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Not with much success.
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But it's interesting to me. I love to write historical verse.
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I love to think what they thought, what it was like.
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Because although
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13:13
many of the speakers and many of the people who are in the audience,
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although you guys can not only go to the moon,
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you know, you're going to totally transform everything.
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Cloning will transform everything. Voice navigation will transform everything.
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I don't know. You can do anything you want.
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All you guys are so clever, and women, you can do it all!
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But human nature doesn't change, mate.
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My friends, human nature is exactly the same as it was
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when my ancestor --
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probably it was my ancestor --
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got his hands around the neck of the last Neanderthal,
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and battered the bastard to death.
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You think we didn't do that?
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Oh, we did.
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We killed every single one of them.
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Inch by inch we killed them.
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We hunted them down wherever they were.
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Rivals for meat. Rivals for berries.
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We're still doing it,
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with all of the genius assembled in this room.
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Our natures haven't changed a single iota.
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And they never will.
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Even when we've got off this little planet,
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and have put some of our eggs in some other baskets.
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And I am as bad as you.
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I spent eight years
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running one of the most successful publishing businesses in the world.
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And at seven o'clock every night,
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I took me some more girls, already corrupted.
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I never did anything to anyone that wasn't.
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And I took crack cocaine,
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every single night for seven years.
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It was like Dante's "Inferno."
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It was unbelievable.
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One of the offshoots of crack cocaine is that you keep an erection
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for about four hours.
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And you stay up for 12.
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It was absolutely unbelievable.
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Twenty-two godchildren I've got.
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What do I say to them?
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I only stopped because I thought if I got caught,
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what would happen to my mother.
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If you're a woman, remember that.
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The love of your son
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can utterly transform anything he does.
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"Our Lady in White."
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Pale she was, listless;
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And soft to the touch.
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A generous mistress Whom many loved much.
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Shoulder to shoulder, Night after night,
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We hoarded and sold her --
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Our Lady in White.
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We breathed but to savor
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her crystal caress.
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We craved but to favor the hem of her dress.
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We dabbled and babbled,
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Denying our thirsts.
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But always we scrabbled
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to lie with her first.
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Absent, we missed her,
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grew haggard and limp.
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Toyed with her sister,
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or threatened her pimp.
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Came word out of Babel, the lady returns!
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And there on the table we took her, in turns.
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Sensing the power that tyranny craves,
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There in that hour, she made us her slaves.
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Many there were, to covet her kiss.
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My shame as a spur,
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I fled the abyss.
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But only just.
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(Applause)
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