Nine Lives
by Nevada Kerr

She unpicks the roses of unspent yearnings
Charmed by the grief of an evangelist burning
Armed with belief and a brief case of rapture
She turns in a splendor of strangers mourning

She rushes into marriage in search of living friends
She looks like every mortal who peels her deader skin
Laughing like a lost child who looks to God for hope
She honors all her contracts and dives off steeper slopes

She sings the death camp mantras in automated forests
Tinkers with robotic monkeys and gene-altered tourists
In white nation states promoting black skin chastisements
She cherishes beauty and the norm in torture advertisements

Wind and water wear down her pious heart
Flowers climb her smile and tear her face apart
Killer seeds in the sand ripen when she cries
Cold wives with ghost eyes die to shear her nine lives

He gnaws her broken body that stinks of lethal sprays
She tears up all his betters and throws them in his grave
They milk human hearts to restore their deader parts
Exchanging arms and legs for bigger microwaves

She has the kind of kindness noone ever repays
Half awake, half alive, and always in the way
A tiny girl blunder marinading fresh flesh clichés
She scours the unclean, cures and cans the unsaved

Making love to old hands and limbless rookie cops
She heavy pets new bodies at the human body shops
She merged for pactless arms and a globalized Sinatra
Picketing the Pearly Gates with her Pearl Harbor dogma

In between endless work and discarded stillbirths
She spawns a hoard of fools you can't afford to hurt
Markets the bloodless colors of another bloody war
And a million reborn orphans plead the brilliance of her cause

Written by Nevada Kerr
3rd January 2002.