The Sacred Hymn of St. Jess the Lepress and Cooter the Baptist
Lepress Jess found herself in a mess
When both of her arms dropped off
But she shrugged her sockets
Wiggled scissors from her pocket
And turned all her shirts into tank tops.
And Boozer Cooter, her handball tutor
Dropped by to see what kept her
He glanced at her nubs
Spat out his cigar stub
And vomited up his lung cancer.
So he snatched up Jess, who couldn’t resist
On account of her lack of biceps
He bought cigars and a six pack
Chained her to a bike rack
Near a crowd by the library steps
And he confessed Jess, like an evangelist
Dubbed himself Cooter the Baptist
“It’s not satirical, man,
She’s a miracle, man!”
And he held up his tumors as evidence
All this distressed Jess, who tried to protest
But her tongue slipped right from her lips
Cooter wrapped it in gauze
To tremendous applause
And used it to cure a passing athiest….of his lupus.
And Cooter accrued a huge multitude
Of adherents, believers, and remoras
Jess cured some of diseases
And some of moral weakness
But most she just made leprous.
And Boyish Les, the easily impressed
Jumped up to give a witness
“I once was a mongoloid
But now I’m more humanoid
Because of St. Jess the Limbless.”
And Mattress Tess, the sex therapist
Who did her best work horizontal
Said, “I once was a temptress, but now I am sinless—
God bless St. Jess and her miracles
From Vegas to Dallas, Phoenix, Annapolis
Disciples, they pilgram’d in mobs
They groped both her breasts
With incredible zest
And canonized the relics that dropped
But Jess reassessed ’til an idea coalesced
And she cursed her slowness in hatching it
But when her pieces stopped raining
’Cause she’d cured her own ailing
The crowds divvied her up with a hatchet.
As Jess the Ex-Lepress felt the edge press her flesh
She said, “I wish I was not such a martyr,”
It was a strange sort of gripe
Since her entire life
She’d never complained about being a leper.
EPILOGUE
And God bless St. Jess the Lepress
And Boozer Cooter the Baptist
For against her insistence
And despite his addictions
They rippled the world for a bit
So fear God and keep his commandments
But do something else besides
Something odd, something off
Something not so default
Something to ripple the mind.
