Doppelgänger

a poem

We taste alternatives like ice cream
served on recyclable bits of wood, 
vanilla, red velvet, big-west-roadtrip, 
and posing for postcards,
our alternatives appear old and authentic.
Only the stamp, USA 2025, reveals the truth.
We stop the car and watch the sunset
cross a familiar road. The subwoofer 
howls a song we sang at the last karaoke 
 night but Charlie's closed three years ago
after they found bats in the rafters
and our beloved philosophy proff moved
to Europe after his wife died and we don’t have 
his address and can’t think of what we’d write
if we did. It makes us think maybe the old wallpaper
was better since everything's painted white these days 
and somehow deja vu is stronger than the drinks
so that everything new seems old and even 
the chopped trunk of the Maple at Madison Elementary 
is suddenly sprouting up again after three long winters and 
Jackie Kennedy’s couch reappears green with polka dots
in our old roommates' basement flat, and so see,
it all comes back around, like the fashion trends,
hurricane seasons, and popular pastimes for the elderly, 
who in ten years will begin picking up skydiving en masse
but for now sit in retirement home gardens in Arizona 
painting our faces on rocks so they can remember
us after we’re gone (to college) until some young nurse comes along
who has Jay’s mustache or Bradley’s voice or Amelia’s way of 
commenting on the weather, so that suddenly we are the ones 
stuck in macaroni frames and we find ourselves wearing 
our grandparents' clothes that have long been absent from thrift stores.