The Water Dispenser
Jonathan Chibuike Ukah

When I told my wife that I loved to drink water,
she flipped her tongue out and slapped my lips,
saying that I would never drink all of her.
She was of water, and I was a thunderstorm,
fallen under her spell, yet so warm and calm,
that her silhouette rumbled my groans.
She knew how to flow through my blood
before floating toward the brownish ocean
where I could not reach her with my lightning.
She caused the ocean to swell and foam,
to lick up dams and suck the seas,
catch fish complaining of drought,
and meet the sky at the point of its needs.
The day she asked me to touch her body,
a mass of slimy and slippery substances
addicted to working out a quiet life,
I lost the nerves in my fingers and palms,
felt the tremors of my hands and feet
as well as the violence of my heart.
It was the beginning of my evolution,
during which I met up with the sky
after packing the clouds on a white sheet
and dropping them at the skinny sea.
My wife said she watched me fight the waves,
and it was a curse to go to war against water,
and her friends, the lakes, ponds and streams
whose laughter echoed in the thick woods,
said, cursed is he who fights and drinks water,
before she agreed to marry a wretch like me.