It's the best of times.
It's the worst of times.
Can anybody say for sure
If we're rich or lost or poor?

The good old days.
The bad old days.
Does anybody really know
If those days were bliss or woe?

People say they know alright.
They express their views and fight
With other people in the know.
They tell each other where to go.

Just like the good old days or bad old days,
Or mad old days when we had ways
To fight with sticks or stones or forks.
That's my field,
That's your rock.
That one's Mindy's, that one's Mork's.
And it's all ours.
We'll fight for it,
To get it back from foreign powers,
Defend this land and get fit.

With decomissioned sticks and stones,
We just have words and names to fight with.
It's the best.
No, it's the worst.
You're a Nazi.
You're a fascist.
I've always been a socialist.
I read Marx. I got the gist.

But all this fighting is so futile.
Words can never hurt me
If I choose what they mean,
And hear the boos as cheers,
And choose to live in bars and beers.
And only leave to see the news
Or read the news
Or be the news with my new nose
And the botox in my head,
The stuff I say
When I speak
In phrases pieced together
From things I heard on TV shows.
I learnt my lines from Hill Street Blues.
A monkey writes the autocues.

2 means 22 or 42 and who are you?
And who are Mork and Mindy too?

For years in school we learn to speak
Our native tongue, from when we're young.
Countless classes every week.
Lists are learnt and songs are sung.

Yet no one seems to know much more
Than words for 'please' or 'word' or 'floor'.

We can no longer fight the Brits
With sticks or stones or bits of things
We find on streets,
Or singing songs about the past,
Or speaking Irish in our lives.
The only way to beat them now
Is forgetting how to talk in English.
To speak their language, we won't know how.

The British Empire, Rule Britania,
Centuries of foreign rule,
Cromwell, Shakespeare, Kings and Queens,
The famine and Trevelyan's corn,
The Industrial Revolution,
The Premiership.
Ye gave us these. Ye ruled the world.
A history of triumphant scenes.
And here at last is our victory:
We've no idea what it all means.