Sand and Blood (Takara X Gaara)
I. Remember when I saw you as a shadow sees the candle's flame?
Of course not.
In the fermented smell of sand and blood like the taste of sun itself
The stories of you baked and hissed in the play of noondog demons
Caught and tossed by shades in the gossip of warning and nostalgia
The adults sipped like their cocktails of better-days and knowing laughs
Chasing us to bed in milklight moons with eyes seafoam-wrought nightmares
So we could play child-monster in the day with our fear scattered
Into the desert moths whispering their wings across the dust at night-
Until I saw your tears.
Silver as the soldering of the stars, melting like candlewax and dripping down
Running into a new oasis at your feet while the blades flew and stung
Kisses of pain sliced across your skin-
Did you start to feel alive then?
Watching the sand corrode your flesh to hide watercolor tainted as the horizon
Like the sunrise bleeding into a crucified sky-
Did you tell yourself each was a gasp of life when you tried not to sob?
You ran into the darkness
Unaware I was the night trying to wrap myself around you.
You gloved your veneer-grit hand in the remains of my father, mud on porcelain
But I knew.
I knew.
II. Crimson tears flow from lifeless eyes to mingle with the endless sands
Bestowing ever greater power upon the demon god.
Come.
My life is a wall of sand.
Come.
My life is crouching in a desert trying to cover my ears from the scream of sand
And finding it's better to try cackling and shouting instead.
Come.
My life is listening to a voice like shards of broken glass
Grating around a heart in my chest dried to a clockwork husk
Swallowed by sand that grins and churns faded memories into granite petals.
Come.
My life is fearing closed eyelids and a sleeplessness not even the fireflies understand
A lifetime spent looking at farther fires in the sky, galaxies like grains of sand
Embers staining the smudge of blackness like drops of blood I might've cried for once
If I'd remembered how.
Come.
My life is crushing them to fragments before they can scream like the boiled bones
Aching for the sun singing above them in her bleached bower calling them home
Never knowing I've stopped screaming for them behind a face made of gilt-smiled sand.
Come.
My life is reaching for life like a butterfly of light beyond an iron-mesh black veil
While I slide backwards in a dune of sand feeling it less and less.
Come.
What more can you do to me?
Sink back and sleep- sleep like the closed eye of the moon for a few precious moments.
Sleep in a night that's cloaked itself in sandless wind and heat the color of forgiveness.
Come.
I will not cease to exist- but for now I can pretend I can.
Blink.
She is looking at me- she is there.
Her hands are on me.
Why?
Why do I know this night?
Why do I know this dark wrapping its arms around me?
III. Remember when I started trying to lie with the truth?
Maybe this time.
On rooftops draped in gauze shadows where my eyes could splinter like water
And in the day where we took turns playing hero with confidence for chakra
You started talking with a voice of graphite enamel, distant as jackal-song
Of feelings no more than powdered words you'd dusted from dictionary scrolls
And looked at wonder on your fingertips while you drew them on the mirror
Standing between us while we each tried to find letters that wouldn't let demons out
In the phoenix that flew from a friend's fingers, like the flower and smile you held out-
Until I coughed up roses in the rain.
I breathed white blossoms in the silver that once again drizzled over your eyes
Under a sky stitched and sewn with memories I wanted to rip down
And throw with the blades I flung in the petals.
Did you mean it when you offered a courtesy like a child's love?
Did you really mean the thing you put in my hand damaged as a dove?
Or were your words like the trickle of sand in your palm?
I put an apology in the cake I gave you- did you taste it, or only blood?
Did you taste the kiss I wanted to give you when I called your name in a demon's heart
Sleeping in nightmares woven from mud and hope like the cask of the sunfire?
You walked away
But I started to know…
IV. In order to exist you need a purpose…
To exist for no purpose is the same as being dead.
Come.
My life is sifting back through the sands to find who I could've been.
Come.
My life is watching loneliness fall one word at a time and slide away in grains of sand
Down an hourglass with no bottom where the orchid shadows pool like oil.
Come.
My life is learning emotion is not a tea-paper gossamer ribbon held in the hand
But a moment given words the color of easy silence shared with someone called 'friend'
Looking out across the sands where time's a psalm humming hate into a forgotten tattoo.
Come.
My life is making the demon understand the chains of sandfire that hold him inside me
And cutting his rage with burning wire that seals him in an ignus cage behind my heart
That no longer kills for the glory of desperation or the need for someone to know
Its sweet citrus pounding again.
Come.
My life is letting the wind smear away the anger like rouge and stigmata wine
And dissolving the barbs of self-hate into tear-drops of sand that dribble away
Blurred by the blood on each hand like the tip of a needle dipped in tears.
Come.
My life is replacing the sand with blood that's my own and no one else's
Mixed with rose clippings from one who knows and whiskers of one who understands.
Come.
My life is finding redemption is a secret cupped between hands bound by a ring of sand.
Come.
What more can you do for me?
Come forth and awake- awake not to the demon but the day like twilight in a bottle
St. Elmo's fire crackling solar freedom within the arms of an embracing night.
Come.
I will not cease to exist- there is no need.
Don't blink.
She is looking at me- she is there.
Her hands are on me.
I know why.
I know the shadows broken like ice that could never survive here and wrap around me.
Sand and blood, the seeds of tomorrow.
I wanted who you were but didn't realize the boy I wanted was the man you've become.
I wanted someone to need me.
I wanted a family not made of Saki and memories of laughter and goldfish confetti.
I wanted to know a bond and count on something other than love of myself.
I wanted someone to share it with even with the lies.
I wanted someone to share it with even with the truth.
Suffering, sadness…joy.
Each other's purpose.
"If all other people exist to magnify that love, then there is no more a splendid universe than this one."