Three Bottles Of Deer Park Water Poem by Felix Bongjoh

Three plastic bottles of Deer Park water

Three bottles of Deer Park water stand, quiet and dry,
on a wooden table frail in its stern look.
Three bottles of life emptied to fuel life
and expedite the wretched ineluctable death
of the three bottles themselves, their veins completely hacked.
Three bottles of water to be emptied into the river
of life given by the Holy Trinity we adore,
embraced by a cassock. A blessing of water
sprinkled to confirm life's vital element with incense,
a seed of man planted to bud prematurely
into a desert's adventure of love.

By a simple wave of the hand, a louder blessing
hoists a hero's flag of confirmed salvation
meant to repel doomed bugs
and slash sin into shreds, condensed into of flowers.

In every faith, water cleanses love
to flare up the soul for a prayer of love -
which is answered through showers of rain
to harness young seedlings into crops, smart.
Showers of rain in a parched heart
are the prodigious golden flowers of gain.

Three empty plastic bottles
of water, their snubbed ions and molecules emptied,
three heavy pieces from a river on its infinite course
of life consumed in a small number of gulps,
in a cascade down the throat. A sneeze exploding
with an engine's vertigo in a thunderous jerk
completes the story of showers
flushed out sloppily and slam-dunked
through the mouth. Twirling, sinking or flowing.

Pivoted only by the strayed bird diving for a drink along
a stream running down the mountain side.
Water sneezed into a river, whose hiccough in the buff,
ends up thundering mightily
down the Niagara Falls emitting rainbow flares.

Clouds sneezing out rains of fortune
have showered the essence of life, a stone, then
a splint, whose virile friction with another thirsty flint
breeds fire; and we need a hose's ire
to quench the thirst of California's infinite
familiar blazes. But when the fireflares
are pumped with brutal force by piles of plastic matter -
sporadically dumped by the hands of a mind-free blight
feeding life's endless greed for invention -
to pop up in balls of flames like those of a strayed aircraft
bound for Mars at the furthest point on our familiar earth
or another object from man's smoky industry of clouds,
each drop of water is a friend's parting toast
of water with glassful loads of arms generously stretched out:

Not only to extinguish a monster's force
to burn down mammoth
turbines for man's further industry,
but also, to raid, with a policeman's savage competence,
what accidentally flares up from the water-starved
touch of a strategic button.

How do we spin an axe, an airplane, an industrial plant,
a shoe in one piece of ingenuity mustered
with a carpenter's swiveled precision
to crown water's worth? Who argues that water isn't
the world's emperor sneaking through the Zambezi,
slithering through the Nile, slaloming through the Mississippi
and zig-zagging through the Amazon?

Wedged effort through exuberant sweat
is cooled off by empathic water, which also burns down
the wind in the storm's spirit. And water calms
the barking dog with a sore voice from which blood spurts out,
the stressful growl of life's engine, steer-wheeled

by a keyboard, a hack, a cart, pen and paper,
shears, a large-hearted grill…or a wheel barrow heartily towing,
with a heavy breath, life's defiant hair-thin filament
of routine chores, marshalled by blood and water,
flapping their sweaty wings
in pools of die-hard perseverance.

Like the apple or peach that must be harvested
to fuel life's essence after an oxen's tough season of abused hooves,
three bottles of water will be canoed to the wooden table,
one by one, as an exhausted dusk fades
into the cradle of a fully-fledged night with a hangover of spikes,
to extinguish the flames of my breathless crash
without a trace of my aircraft's black box already in ruins.
Before I'm extinguished by a hiccough rather than a cascade,
I need another bottle of water, the punch,
to flush out my spirits into the soothing flames of sleep.
My plastic sleep molded by a tiring day,
into which video screens float on a bight of fright,
grows into a river of purity with the cyst of a chimerical thirst.