Don't mess with people.
In Cambridge, which is near where I live, right?
There's is this friend of mine.
His name is Charles Cole, great poet.
Great guy.
Just a lovely guy, right?
He has these meetings.
It's called boys night in, right?
[LAUGHTER]
That means all of us guys who are married
and all of that stuff, we get to go somewhere
where we just stay there and no women allowed, right?
You remember the woman haters club with The Three Stooges,
right?
So we get there and we eat the most fattening food
you can imagine.
We don't count one single carb, right?
We drink copious amounts of fermented beverages
and we sit up here and we talk about old girlfriends, right?
The stuff our wives won't let us talk about.
But we also watch these kinds of movies, the straight up male
testosterone, testicles on the screen kind of movies, right?
So because our wives wont let us watch them at home.
So we like to see Vin Diesel in Pitch Black
and all this other kind of stuff.
And all these Bruce Lee flicks where people are just whipping
ass all over the place.
And of course, there is Shaft, right?
So he-- we watched this movie that I had seen once as a kid
but never really seen before.
Some of you may know it.
It's called Cool Hand Luke.
You've heard of it, right?
Well, for those of you who haven't seen it,
there's a point in this movie that
brings all of these convicts on the road together.
And I have a feeling that that's the scene
that probably every rap video has tried to copy, right?
And this is from a manuscript in remission
called "Digging The Scene."
A scene from Cool Hand Luke.
"Those who know, know.
Those who don't know find out.
We were gelded centaurs.
Broke tame as state fair ponies licking sugar cubes
from children's palms.
All of us, even the hardest were cut down
and flung to the world's jagged geography
same as the roadside weeds we scythed into Louisiana sky.
We were wed to dust, sweat to sunlight
glinting on rifle barrels.
Our swinging arms were pendulums marking
time inside of boss man's mirrored glasses,
mirrored eyes.
We had never really noticed the house by the roadside.
Its decrepit tilt into itself.
The high grass around its rain worn steps.
How it slept, like a drunk, silent in the heat.
That is until it stirred, stretched,
yawned in the sluggish noon, and she stepped out
of its mouth looking like 10 years hard labor.
She moved like she needed a man.
Her head was a tassel of bleached daylight sweeping
the right side of her face leaving one swamp green eye
to wink a bulge into our county blues.
A single safety pin kept her flower print dress
from falling.
Kept it lying and laying like a threadbare cuss
word across her body's curved profanity.
She carried a bucket of soapy water in one hand
and in the other us.
She set the bucket down by the great forward
of the front lawn.
She pretended to have come out to wash then kneeled,
reach forward for the garden hose laying
in the grass like the woman-- like the weapon each man wanted
to become.
She twisted the metal spigot at the end until water came up
and with her tongue snaking between her lips,
leaned forward to take a drink.
Water entered her mouth as if her mouth were a church
and every man on row felt part of himself praying.
"Lucille," muttered the man to my right.
The name boiling out his mouth like rotgut
cooking on a pot-bellied stove.
Saying it's so slow he almost made two words out of it.
"Anything looked so innocent but built like that
has got to be named Lucille."
And for a moment, all of us, every cutthroat
and counterfeiter, rapist and thief, murderer and boss man
were held together by the pen in a woman's dress.
One small shining thing damming back glory.
We were loaves of stone turned to bread.
Boils scratched against clay shards given one more reason
to curse God and die."
[APPLAUSE]