A world unlike your own

A single stone (Not)

He didn't own it.
Not a single stone of the breathing walls.
Not a splinter of the warm decrepit frame,
nor a thread of the moth bitten curtains.

His paint stained the marble tiles
almost as much as it did his canvas,
the off-white sheets doing little to
protect the gothic interior.

He'd rearranged
— what was left —
of the ageing furniture,
taking care not to disrupt the
abundant greenery that had made its
home within the mansion walls.

Warm lighting bounced off every
surface in the room,
if not from the windows
(of which there were few)
then from the abundant array of
candles
and torches in which he'd arranged
around the building.

He'd mended the crumbled walls on
the west side of the building;
substituting the stone with a
wooden frame that worked its way up
the three stories,
and intertwined its way through the
bluestone
as though it were roots of a tree
growing its way through dirt.

The frame held glasses of all different
shapes,
shades and sizes,
casting a rainbow of hues and tints into
every room it connected too.

No,
in no legal way did he own this wonderful,
mystical,
impossible building.

But he'd made it his own,
and it reflected him
almost as clearly as a mirror.