Poetry 14: Me!

So I told you I had an assignment to imitate a poem I liked. I chose the poem by Lance Larsen that I shared with you yesterday. So here's my imitation:

Cowed by Chicago
by Darlene Young

So why did the pizza-delivery boy choose our credit-card number to steal?
Was it because we asked for substitutions in the spaghetti meal-deal,

dithered over the extra charge for cheese on garlic bread in a city where people
toss bills nonchalantly at taxi drivers? Was our small-town green so obvious,

the way we’d holed up in our room rather than risk those strange, dark streets?
Did “sucker” appear in smoky letters on our tender-sprout foreheads as we

scrabbled for a pen to sign the receipt? A four-hour flight had reduced us to animal
needs (food, bath, bed), blurred our minds so that his paper shuffling seemed

a benign symptom of our bleary fatigue. Sign here, he said, looking past us,
perhaps already planning the big purchase at the porn store we’d later find

on the credit card bill—-perhaps the same store that had scared us into
staying in our room in the first place. Ah, to prove him right in our naivete.
.