Abandoned Buildings

By Zelda Louise

In the words of John Steinbeck, “A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.” This piece is an abstract experiment that tells the story of a trip that took a young girl and made her a woman. She met many characters: depression, confusion, self-hatred, substance abuse, sexual awakening, love, forgiveness, and understanding. And at this pilgrimage’s denouement, she arose from a forgotten, abandoned building with one voice ringing clear, ready to plunge once again into a bold new journey within herself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781684093137

Book preview

Abandoned

Buildings

A Collection of Rants, Raves,

and Ramblings

Zelda Louise

Copyright © 2016 Zelda Louise

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2016

ISBN 978-1-68409-312-0 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68409-313-7 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Escape from Alcatraz

Smoke and Mirrors

Balloon

The Opium of the People

Neglect

Watching

6:28

Tart or Cake

Student Loans

Ice Sculpture

The Colors of Love

Digitalia

Dementia’s Redemption

Dry Dreams

The Wolf

Abandoned Buildings

Molly Memorabilia

Bye-Bye, Delilah

Jamie

A Song of Ice and Fire

Pleasantville

Weezie’s Measuring Tape

The Night You Cut Yourself

The First Tear

Worship at 6 AM

Thoughts on Nudity

Butcher House

One Voice

Escape from Alcatraz

And with a trapped and tethered heart

With yellow-fevered, ironed, starched, resolve

The call of the wild spread

My palms of stone, my searching fingers, toward

The final grouted, mortar block

The last verdant, sodded sprigs

That obstruct my escape from Alcatraz

And while the whining winds

The taciturn June raindrops

Of Portland sweetly sing my name

My mother’s muddled judgments

Drum against my blistered heels.

And with Dickinson jarring

Her jilted eyes against my clammy back

My knobby, knocking knees shake their way

Down the shifting pavements of Magnolia Drive

Ekchuah, lead me on, archaic firelight

Soothe my burning shoulders

Silence the hungry rumbles that echo

Against the veiny walls of my angry intestines

As I fight to find a place to rest

My empty head, my bloodstained boots

My serrated cardboard soul

And when I find that blessed mountain

That stretching flowered plain

That blink-lighted city corner

That ship-dotted harbor home

My wanderer’s wings will molt, give up the ghost

And my drowsy bones will pitch

A wood and canvas home

And by the light of a thousand fags

My tobacco dreams rewrote

The ballad of love and hate

Whose labored A minor strains

Expressly laid my cantharid form to rest

Away from the concrete-trimmed suburban ruins of

My escape from Alcatraz

Smoke and Mirrors

Filthy words, French exhale

Shifting informalities

Leathered shoulder blades, empty cartridge shells

Halfhearted, messy gangrene memoirs

Rusted, stony day-old heartbeats

Dusty ledgers, indolent ballpoint pens

Blackened teeth,