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Queen Victoria
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Queen Victoria,
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My father and all his tobacco loved you,
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I love you too in all your forms,
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the slim and lovely virgin floating among German beer,
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the mean governess of the huge pink maps,
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the solitary mourner of a prince.
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Queen Victoria,
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I am cold and rainy,
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I am dirty as a glass roof in a train station,
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I feel like an empty cast iron exhibition,
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I want ornaments on everything,
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because my love, she gone with other boys.
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Queen Victoria,
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do you have a punishment under the white lace,
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will you be short with her, make her read those little Bibles,
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will you spank her with a mechanical corset.
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I want her pure as power, I want her skin slightly musty with petticoats
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will you wash the easy bidet out of her head?
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Queen Victoria,
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I'm not much nourished by modern love,
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will you come into my life
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with your sorrow and your black carriages,
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And your perfect
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memories.
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Queen Victoria,
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the Twentieth Century belongs to you and me.
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Let us be two severe giants not less lonely for our partnership,
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who discoloured test tubes in the halls of Science,
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who turned up unwelcome at every World's Fair,
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heavy with proverb and correction
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confusing the star-dazed tourists
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with our incomparable sense of loss.
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Queen Victoria
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Leonard Cohen |