I Have Traveled Farther Than Chicago

Pretty anchorwomen
With odd names like "Soledad"
Read off of teleprompters,
Attacking the women
Covered in sheets
Who danced in jublilation in an alley
The day that their spiritual brothers
Brought the Twins down,

And of course we are all coerced to agree,
To purge the ponderance
That a coercion could escape from such full,
Rosy lips,
Slip past teeth whiter than we make our skin out to be.

I want to know if they were dancing.
Who is to say
They weren't jumping up and down,
Legs and arms flailing
Like a puppet piloted by a scabies victim,
Just to evade a landmine
Some American
(Or Brit, etc.)
Had put there?

Of course I can't yet lay blame
On anyone;
I was not there to watch the movement of their feet.
None of us were.

The fartest many Americans travel
In their lives that distill down
To forty hours a week, every week
Between 15 and a half
And 55,
Is from St. Louis
Or Cleveland
To Chicago,
To be in the audience of a talk show,
And feel cosmopolitan
For walking the block between their hotel
With the amenity of an airport shuttle,
Buying a ticket,
And sitting down.

I have traveled farther than Chicago.

In June, I walked the streets
Of Paris, stumbled into
Some nondescript burger joint,
Stumbled over "je voudrais"
Like it was La Chanson de Roland,
Grappled with comprehending how much I owed,
Although I had gripped in my hands
The essence of French language
Contastly for five and a half years before.

They say French is a useless
Language to an American. Spanish is
The second most important,
But I believed in appreciating the world
Outside the confines of fifty stars
And thirteen stripes,
That was until the madamoiselle
Behind the counter
Said, in a perfect American tongue,
That I did not have to worry about speaking
French in her presence,
That the rumors were true:
Everyone in any city that matters
Speaks English,
And those who don't,
Well, they don't matter of course.

So if I were to walk the streets of Kabul,
And stumble into the alley
Where ghastly apparations with breasts
Masquerade,
Would they communicate
To me
That my desire to understand them
Was irrelevant?