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Claude Mills May 2013
There is a void
Somewhere between what is perceived
And what wishes to be.  

A place for that which lingers,
On precipices and peripheries.  
Dancing

On edges of reality,
Out of hands reach,
In the corner of the eye.  

Belief lies between
Knowledge and imagination,
Carving a gap between
The late and the early.

Reality is real
Only to those who live it.
For the rest,
It’s just a story to be told.  

Time is the void,
And through it we weave
Our own mythologies.
Claude Mills Oct 2013
Sunlight leaks low in the West.
A line of brilliant gold clings to the horizon
And crowns the ancient peaks in forgotten glory.

Day is defeated.  Lethargically,
It slips from the sky like melting butter,
Like a bell-bottomed tear.

Declaring dusk, Indigo fills the air.  
Each sense becomes wrapped in a blue hush,
Broken only by the winds soulful cries.  

Colours deepen.  Infinity
Is exposed as night sprinkles her constellations
Like celestial dust.

The touch of cold stone pulls me home.  
Somewhere, a wild cat calls to the moon
And the chimney offers smoke to the sky.
Claude Mills Mar 2013
Life glows from the ashes,
Red and dead.
Rest assured I will not waste

My atoms.  The sea
In which they swim is not
So fickle as life.

From the land Persephone is torn
Into the heat of hell-
But fire can serve a woman well.

In Spring she shoots forth
A million delicate souls.
Piercing

Through flames, the willowherb of this
Barren body will take seed,
Will flower.

In its own way beautifying
My scorched scars,
My cauterized heart.

The fatal lick of a poison dart
Will take only me,
My anatomy.

The tools remain,
They regain their power
And Persephone will rise through me.

I have seen it before,
This end feeds desire.
Life at its finest is paved with fire.
Claude Mills Apr 2013
A visual echo plays the surface,
Dancing and distorted.  
In a very real sense she lives
And for a moment I am overcome with a fear
That she is the true form.  

When the surface is abandoned
She is forced to move through nothingness,
Waiting for my face to pull her back
To our world, where visual bodies lie.

I am lost in thoughts of where she wonders,
Without path or guidance.  
Does she truly cease to exist at all
When my gaze no longer rests on her?

But how instantly she can return!  
Sometimes hazy, deformed, ghostly,  
Sometimes broken by the tide.  
But always truly faithful,
Always an honest reflection.
Claude Mills May 2014
I still caress the place
in my arms you used to occupy.
The aching emptiness
you imparted on my chest
burrows
down through my stomach.
I'm moth eaten,
hollow.  

The imprint your body left on the mattress
refuses to smooth out.

Since you left, I only notice spaces.  
All solid things
evade me.
Claude Mills Dec 2013
The corner is a place often forgotten, inhabited by only dust and darkness.  It is the periphery, the edge of our reality, where mystery and imagination can find home. Thought flourishes on dust and darkness. Thought is allowed to be free in the corners, for those who wish to stamp it out are blind to the intricacies of edges.

Those of us open to the realms of imagination inhabit these places. We do not fear edges for we live our lives as outsiders.  From the safety of our corners we are watching, absorbing, whilst the people of space (those free of care and fear) make their way through the room, mingling with others of space.

But we thought-corner people move with caution through space.  We feel its vulnerability like eyes upon exposed flesh- we feel our thoughts escape into the void, into the ether of emptiness, like dust into a vacuum, like a storm into the night.  We are forced to make a fast retreat back to the edges of reality where we are out of hands reach, in the corner of the eye, in the corner of the mind.  We are never quite in focus but we are weaving dreams like twine, telling our stories, reliving our memories.

We carve our gap with axes made of daydreams.  We know the power the corner holds.
A prose-poem written to accompany artwork while on a residency in Sicily.
You
Claude Mills Oct 2013
You
You are far more wonderful
in my imagination
than in reality.
I need to remember that.

— The End —