Why do Americans travel?
Paris, May 11, 2019
Why do Americans travel?
Why do American voices travel?
Drifting across the terrase
an invasion
of sunshine
— Oh! My! Gawd!
— Hashtag!
— Yeah, yeah.
— Don’t even get me started!
— I want to talk about, like…
And whinging about smoking.
They don’t like the smell.
I see. An aesthetic judgement.
Well I don’t like your face or your nasally tones or your endless chipper chirping or your outmoded
spelling or even myself.
A bell from the 46 chimes over and over every half-second
and a horn beeps. It beeps. It does not honk.
Is it coming or going from that shithole
that is
Gare du Nord?
Is it the pitch? The American squeak? Does it pass through the air more easily than our miserable and
lumpen European mumblage that thuds in a damp bog of memory and destruction under the weight of
history and the steel grey skies and the sneering and the sarcasm that drags us down into the very
bowels of the earth to where we might finally find the only thing that we over here ever wanted and
the only thing that could make us happy and that we long for day after day after day:
death.