Knuckles

Knuckles.

I.

I guess I laid my backhand
down on the sunspot burner;
boiling- red – communist:

Giving and taking equally,
as its warmth to bone-shank soup
allows growth—its warmth to
flesh though, chars and scalps,
my knuckles raw: cracked cobblestone,
black and peeling top layers.

II.
Prayers for third degree
burns need not fly to the other
side of my palms. They should drip into
the rivers run with pollution, brackish and
swimming with silt. Like my lungs, post pack consumption.

There the water prayers, liquid humanity,
will be filtered and cleaned and will leap
from little home taps, faucets, and sinks:
rustic brown-red metals, shiny silvers, cold
and gray pipette giraffes, children’s toys
largely ignored until: burn.

III.
The flesh singed, epidermal ruptures occur:
blisterous mountain tops popped with the
abandon of boredom and dissatisfaction.
Infection holed up under finger nails are
Toe jam hermits, vagrants, bumming smokes
under freeways, not speaking- for the cars on
the overpass speak for them--
they say nothing.
They stay there until there is no
room left for them.
They get reckless, and pull apart that ground
leaving pink tender craters outlined in translucent
vulnerable flaps of flesh, infected unless:

IV.
Those prayers made it into the water.
Cool, soothing H two prayers.

I can leave the scarred arms and singed bricks the
vagrants pulled up from my cobblestone
walk. I simply need to turn on the water.
Other humans will run over my hot red skin,
little circles of shame, they will
soothe
my

Burn.