A Novel Idea -- Roxy's Lost Years Inspired by 'Amour Americain'

Day One Year One: I Am Reborn

I open my eyes and still I am in darkness. Slowly, shapes and dots of light reveal themselves. White and silver on a canvas of ebony black. I realize that I am breathing hard, with cold air ripping through my lungs. Some THING rattles by and I do not know if it is a rat or an autumn leaf. The poem! Find the poem! Reach into my coat to touch the envelope and I smile, I can breathe again. I remember that, despite losing everything, all of my worldly goods, that I am loved by God and one woman. There is nothing more a man needs in this world. Nothing!

However, it is dangerous in this alley at two o’clock in the morning when even the sounds of taxis and the number 6 train are rare and there are strange and desperate men like myself moving through the empty streets. I shiver from the chill as I only had a moment when I realized that the men were coming up my stairs and I only had seconds to decide on what I could grab before being dragged out and cast into the street by the goons…no! No, Robert, don’t do that to them and yourself…by the men send to clear me out of my home.

Of course I made sure the poem was safe against my heart and then I went to my easel and found my oldest and dearest friend: a camel’s hair brush that I have been using since college; and slid that into my backpack. No time or room for canvas or color except for a new tube of crimson red that had yet to have its mouth unstopped. Unstopped. Strange word to use right now. The poetesses in my life have left their mark.