Matt Caliri Poet Free verse

Conspiracy Theory: He's Got My Face

There's another man my age
On the other side of town.
He's got my face, my exact face.
Our back accounts are different.
For all I can tell, his car is nice.
Married, big happy family.
His jokes are the same as my jokes.

I saw him at a cafe yesterday.
I was sitting with my daughter.
He was sitting with his son.
For a moment we made eye contact.
He laughed through it
Pitching his head back,
Sustaining the contact with me,
His doppelganger.
Then back to his son,
Then me back to my daughter.

Yesterday I watched him get on a plane to Wichita,
Hugging good-bye to his wife and kids at the gate.
There goes my face, I thought, off to Kansas.
Doors closed as the plane taxied away
And his sad family meandered.

"Daddy!" yelled his youngest
Spotting me behind the fern
50 ft away in front of 
Fern Gully's Gastropub.

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David Crandall May 19, 2026 at 8:36 PM wow, haha, that's weird, that guy got your face. It sounds like it could be a paralle universe mix up. The funny thing is almost the same thing happened to me. In Downey, there's 2 high schools and on the other side of town there was another Dave Crandall. I only heard about him year after year, never met him. Plenty of people in Downey knew both of us. I found out he was born 5 days before me.