Doppelgangers by A. Iwasa
 
I'm convinced everyone has at least one doppelganger.  There are only so many ways a human being can look.

For years I was haunted by one, who also had the same first name.  I became aware of this the first time I walked into Common Ground, a café in Kamm's Corners, Cleveland.  I walked up to the counter, and a really pretty barista said, "Hello Alex."

I was smitten but dumbfounded.  I asked, "How do we know each other?"

She squinted a little, and said, "Oh, funny, you look like my friend, Alex."

A few years later I was on my way to Common Ground for my second time and told this story.  My ride's older sister was sitting with me in the back seat and said, "That was me!  You look like my friend Alex, and I was the only cute girl working there, then!"

I could have keeled over and died.  She was still all kinds of cute, and now she was starring at me.  Perhaps this was when I found out Alex fronted Cows in the Graveyard.

Rewind to 1996, and I'm walking through a way over sold Mushroomhead, Incantation, Forlorn show at the Phantasy Nite Club in Lakewood, Ohio.  An extremely attractive young woman walks up to me and exclaims, "Alex!"

I ask, "How do we know each other?"

She looks me over and says. "Sorry, you look like my friend Alex."

"I am Alex!"

She laughs and replies, "Oh, funny, you're also named Alex?" then walks away leaving me disappointed.

A year or two later I'm walking through Parmatown Mall, and briefly talk with another mall rat.  Later he told me as I walked away his companion said, "He looks like my friend, Alex."

He told her, "That was Alex."

"No, Alex sings for a band."

"Alex sings for a band."

"Not him, different Alex."

I was also told she thought Alex was hot, for whatever that was worth.

A few years later I was on my way to Washington, DC to protest the war in Afghanistan before it started.  We stopped in Kent, and a student I didn't know sat down next to me and we got to talking.  Eventually she told me I looked like the singer of a band she just saw.  I asked if the bands was Cows in the Graveyard, but she couldn't remember.  I was ready to lose my mind!

The next summer I was at a drum circle behind the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on a Sunday evening, and a lovely young woman I just met told a mutual friend she might have still been dating at the time, "Doesn't he look like Alex?"

He simply replied, "Alex is hot?"

"You think so?!"

"Yes!"

"I don't."

We make eye contact, I'm frowning deeply.  She laughs awkwardly and says, "What I'm saying?  Alex is hot."  We sort of become friends that summer, but I was always a bit suspicious that she was using me to make her ex jealous.

In October that year, the International ANSWER Coalition organized demonstrations against the second Iraq War before it started, and I went to the action in Clevo's Public Square.

Somehow I ended up in a conversation about doppelgangers, and I heard the worst doppelganger story ever:  "About every five years someone walks up to me, punches me in the face, and then says, 'Oh my God, I'm so sorry!  I thought you were someone else!'"

We all laugh heartily, I can't top that one, but I share my haunting story to a few good laughs.

Later I keep hearing people shout, "Alex!" but they're never calling for me.  I notice someone else answering all the calls as he dorks with the PA.  He has brown skin, about my height, glasses, shaggy hair (we both had long, long hair, then cut it about the same time)... and a backpatch:  Cows in the Graveyard.  I walk up to my long lost brother, and introduce myself.

I retell my story of how I'd been hearing about him for some six and a half years.  He'd like to know who all these pretty women were.

Godless Libraries

“Our duty is manifest,” Greg intoned, peering down through the bright lights and into the seats which were filled with members of Citizens Concerned for Children; this was yet another right wing group that he coveted. 

He hoped to recruit them in his unrelenting quest to ban virtually all books from school libraries.  The crowd shouted its approval.   Greg smiled.  He was happily in his element.

Greg, Governor of his state, held up his hands for quiet only halfheartedly; he adored adulation from the unwashed masses.  

“Do you know what your children are reading?” he boomed out ominously. He held up a book–“Rubyfruit Jungle”– and the crowd booed on cue.  In back of the room, Fox News filmed the address. Sean Hannity provided a running commentary.

Taking up the volume, Greg ripped it into two pieces, then cast it to the floor, where it landed with a loud splat, which echoed throughout the huge hall.

The audience went “ooh,” at the Governor’s display of outrage and pure physical strength.

“Here’s another one we don’t need,” he declared, holding up “Beloved,” to the hisses and catcalls from those assembled.

Clutching the book over his head, he ripped the book in two.  The cloud politely applauded, duly impressed. 

Unknown to the audience, Greg had had the books’ spines broken prior to the meeting.

He said, “We want to get rid of “The Bluest Eye” and “A Catcher in the Rye” and “Huckleberry Finn” and “The Hate U Give,” and “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”

With each successive declaration the crowd’s excitement grew.

“Do you know what the presence of these books in the library leads to?” he asked.

Someone shouted out, ” Black Lives Matters!” Another yelled, “Critical Race Theory!” Greg nodded somberly in agreement with each shouted statement. “It means,” he said gravely, “godlessness!”

The crowd was in a frenzy now, excited almost beyond even Greg’s expectations. “Are you with me, then?” he demanded.

“Yes!” shouted the audience and four hundred fists were thrust righteously into the air.

“All right then,” said the Governor, cuing a queue of young men who fanned out across the room.  “I’m going to ask you good folks for a love offering,  These funds will be used to finance the campaigns of candidates who agree with you, that these godless books should be removed from our libraries.  Please give generously.

As the boys avidly gleaned the riches from the assemblage, Greg appeared to grow thoughtful, leaned into the mic and said, “And tomorrow, we’ll talk about restoring prayer to our classrooms.  We’ve got a Constitution to safeguard, people!”

The Town Fool

Bob never stays at home
He never wanted to be alone
In the street corner with lively tone,
Dancing with pointed hat like a gnome
You have odd jobs you want to be done,
And your lazy hubby's out of town
Just call Bob, he will not let you down
Don't give Bob money, or he'll be gone
Bob loves cookies and hot chocolate,
Surely your groceries won't be late! 
Once a stranger used it as a bait, 
And poor Bob met a violent fate
The whole town went into great uproar
No one believed, for Bob, such horror
Stranger caught, he's seriously beaten
Even judge didn't think twas bad thing
Why the fury? He's just the town fool.
Getting all worked up, they're just ain't cool! 
Bob may seem to you just a fool,
But he's well-loved by all the people


Women Empowerment 

W isdom gathered through blood and tears
O bligations done with loving smiles not fears
M arriage is a bonus and not a necessity 
E ngaging in any desired opportunity 
N urturing the family, society, human community 

E nvironmental awareness for rehabilitation
M otherhood deserves honor and protection
P eace and prosperity is her deepest ambition 
O utspoken yet meekness of the soul makes sense
W omen encompass the balance of existence 
E nvisioned future without its chaotic norms
R ejuvenate nature in its realistic forms
M en can be stronger with women as equals
E mpowered without barbaric rituals
N ations will have survival chance to course
T ruth be told, women can be your salvation or curse.


Lilian Dipasupil Kunimasa was born January 14, 1965, in Manila Philippines. She has worked as a retired Language Instructor, interpreter, caregiver, secretary, product promotion employee, and private therapeutic masseur. Her works have been published as poems and short story anthologies in several language translations for e-magazines, monthly magazines, and books; poems for cause anthologies in a Zimbabwean newspaper; a feature article in a Philippine newspaper; and had her works posted on different poetry web and blog sites. She has been writing poems since childhood but started on Facebook only in 2014. For her, Poetry is life and life is poetry. 

Lilian Kunimasa considers herself a student/teacher with the duty to learn, inspire, guide, and motivate others to contribute to changing what is seen as normal into a better world than when she steps into it. She has always considered life as an endless journey, searching for new goals, and challenges and how she can in small ways make a difference in every path she takes. She sees humanity as one family where each one must support the other and considers poets as a voice for Truth in pursuit of Equality and proper Stewardship of nature despite the hindrances of distorted information and traditions.

My tongue that entered my ear as lullaby,
My valiant tongue in the bosom of the ages,
I will write you every moment,
My blood, my language, oh, my motherland.

Come strolling, meaning my language,
Always sing like a nightingale my tongue,
He has the spirit of Navoi, he has Babur,
Let every dialect be beautiful, my language.

Every word has a hundred meanings in my mother tongue,
Every flame is a fire in every heart,
Everything ripples in this language,
Endless treasure, legend in my tongue.

This is my language, which the whole world respects.
This is my language, inherited from my ancestors.




Abdunazarova Khushroy was born on December 21, 2008. She is 15 years old. Currently, she is a pupil of 8th grade of the 15th DIUM of Mingbulak district, Namangan region. She is interested in English and Mathematics. She wants to become a interpreter in the future. And also she is a member of the international organization "All India Council for Technical skill development".

Written in memory of President Abraham Lincoln, to whom the poem refers as the captain of the ship of state by the master of Lincolnian  verses. “O Captain! My Captain!” have parallel readings in analogy to “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” as transcendental poems by Poet of the Civil War, Walt Whitman. Grieving the lamentable bereavement of President Abraham Lincoln in contextualizing the universal implications of spatiotemporality as if there was the endowment of everyman’s elegiac dirge-like hymnal observance in the commemorative spirit of the cultural imagination.

Lincoln’s death is absorbed and re-coded as an extended metaphor, a projection of the speaker’s imaginative fantasy relating the objective historicity of memorial. “My Captain” is not only a term of endearment and loyalty, but a claim upon the person in correspondence to the solidarity and camaraderie of  brethrenship in contrast with the acknowledgement and celebration of death as the end of all suffering that is especially true when considering “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”: the poem transports readers from a trinity of stimuli; that reminds the speaker’s of Lincoln’s heartless and inhumane cessation of life as observable in Lilacs newly bloom’d; “the great star early dropped in the Western sky in the night” and the “ever-returning spring” to the memory of Lincoln’s funeral procession “the coffin that slowly passes” on which the speaker leaves a “sprig of lilacs” … “but, praised! Praised! Praised!“ / “For the sure unwinding arms of cold enfolding death”. Social phenomena are encountered and absorbed as a kind of inseparable hyperconsciousness as apparently evidenced in the anthology Leaves of Grass .

The Lincoln poems are instances of the presidential death by assassination that resonates within the speaker’s mind whether in the crisp and condensed epitaph “This Dust Was Once The Man” or the deep languid reverberations of “But O heart! heart! Heart!” / “O the bleeding drops of red,”/ “Where on the deck my captain lies,” / “Fallen cold and dead.” […] “It is some dream that on the deck”/ “You’ve fallen cold and dead” […] “But I with mournful tread,”/ “Walk the deck my Captain lies,”/ “Fallen cold and dead.” Whitman’s elegies re-enacts and aestheticizes the mourning process; they revel in the lush subjectivity of the speaker as emphases of the stanza revelations manifest through floral laurel wreaths: “For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—- For you the shores’ a -crowding” / “For you, they call the swaying mass, their eager faces turning.”

Walt Whitman finds the stature of Abraham Lincoln to be visionary, practical, prophetic, messianic and shrewdly realistic; Lincoln in Whitmanian perspectives was the poetic Shakespearean exhibited in both private and public affairs; Americanness symbolic of the roughs and beards, space and ruggedness and nonchalance literally anti dandified but prairie stamped character. “O Captain! My Captain!” is a rhetorical statement of the paradox involved in the president’s dying in the consecration and veneration of the brave heartedness and heroism. The Captain is also the speaker’s father as noted here: “Here Captain! dear father!/ This arm beneath your head! It is some dream that on the deck/ You’ve fallen cold and dead.” The figure of Lincoln shone over brighter despite the tragic incompleteness of his achievements: “Exult O shores, and ring O bells!/ But I with mournful treads, / Walk the deck my Captain lies,/ Fallen cold and dead.”

Walt Whitman’s transformation was grandiose and loftier in shifting and changing from the poet of the body to the poet of the soul, thus becoming poet of internationalism and cosmic from intense nationalism. This is crystal clear in the eloquence of the gratified poetic personality of Whitmanian spirit: […] “no more smart sayings, scornful criticisms or harsh comments upon persons or events, or private and public affairs […] never attempt puns or play upon words or utter sarcastic comments.” Passage to India foreshadows Walt Whitman’s fusion of traditional and philosophical speculations, contemplative reflections and poignant meditative perspectives of spiritual being in temporality towards immortality. “Divine efforts of the heroes and their ideas faithfully lived upon” symbolize Columbus as major figure within the allegorical symbolic background reading contextualizing the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad in May 1869 and the idea of the mystic passage of the soul to India. In addition to these scientific accomplishments including the Suez Canal connecting Europe to Asia and the Transatlantic Cable. Material and spiritual fulfillment prophetically revealed through “Passage to India” cloaked by the awkward enterprises of captains, engineers, explorers, voyagers, and scientists; and the mystification of the poet laureate merging with the Christian spirit: “Nature and man shall b disjoin’d and diffus’d no more/ The true son of God shall absolutely fuse them.” 

Walt Whitman’s verbal melody and pictorial picturesqueness quintessentially enshrines the poetic aesthetics enfolded by the traditional and orthodox organic form and structure of art-nature analogy in “Passage to India!” . The passage literally refers to tangible reality of the transcendental American revolutionary achievements of scientific progress including the transcontinental railroad, the transatlantic cable and the Suez Canal while the surface metaphoricity of the cloaked textuality engraves the embodiment of enlightenment illuminative of labyrinthine alleyways from the discovery of knowledge to the advent of faith and spirituality as proclaimed by the declamatory phrases from the perspectives of the authorial viewpoint that dispels mysteries and enigmas of explorers, adventurers, voyagers and expeditionists. 

Walt Whitman’s “Passage to India!” is a metamorphoses that occurs by the transposition, superimposition, transportation and transformation and/or flowing from descension to ascension through the cyclical flow of thoughts and feelings in the allegory of the biblical genesis of human individuals mounting to their deity in supplication of salvation and atonement. Organic evolution follows this metamorphoses towards meaning and effect between the continuum of changing and shifting. Form the point of view of multifaceted visages of  poet, biologist and astronomer, God divines the cosmic power of celestial order with effulgence of phosphorescence to light, water, fountain and emotional tranquility. Crowning voyage of the individual returning to the soul paves the restoration of the younger kinsman melting in the fondness of the elderly sibling for the sake of death as comradeship fulfilling in itself. Pulse-like radiations of energy animate the poetic world of spiritual reality. Changing, shifting and evolving nature of life comes into perspective through the cycles of renewal within the pulse-like radiation. “Bathe me O God in thee […] seas of God” resonates the streams of Gangetic and Indus basins and their affluents; thoughts move like waters flowing in analogy with the rivulets running throughout literary history and cultural memory. In other words, projections of specificity in the historical trajectories implicate the spirits of the succumbing explorers descending and sinking down the slopes. 

“Down from the gardens of Asia, descending radiating/

 Adam and Eve appear, then their myriad progeny after them,/ 

Wandering, yearning and curious with restless explorations,/

With questionings, baffled, formless, feverish with never happy hearts,/

With that sad, incessant refrain, Wherefore O unsatisfied soul?, and whither I mocking life?”

Fortunate fall shrewdly points to the Biblical genesis referencing the allusive nature of allegorical transcendentalist humanity heralded by the spirit and matter. In this sense, frustration, despair, disillusionment, void, melancholia  are implicated as inevitable premise of hybris in individualism. “Columbus walking in footlights in some great scena” notes Whitman of “[t]he sunset splendour of chivalry declining” to “misfortunes, culminatos[…] dejection, poverty and death.” Rediscovery of the Orientalists through “ascending body and spirit mounting to heaven” reinforces “the towers of fables immortally fashioned from mortal dreams.” Richard Chase in Walt Whitman Reconsidered has examined the relinquishment of poetry and the upholding of speech-making or oratorical quality as exemplified by the critical passage: 

“The musing, humorous, paradoxically indolent but unprecedentedly energetic satyrs poets of the 1850s becomes the large, bland, gray personage with the vague light blue eyes and circumambient beard. Dionysius becomes not Apollonian but positively Hellenistic—prematurely old age, […] soothsaying, spiritually universalized. The deft and flexible wit disappears along with the contrarieties and disparities which once produced it. The pathos, once so moving when the poet contemplated the disintegration of the soul or felt the loss which all living things know, is now generalized out into a vague perception of the universal.”  

Further Reading

Scott Borchert’s Lincolniana, “Southwest Review” Volume 100, No. 1, pp. 12-21, Southern Methodist University 

Stanley K. Coffman Jr’s [University of Oklahoma, Norman] Form and Meaning in Whitman’s “Passage to India”, PMLA, June 1955, Volume. 70, No. 3, pp. 337-349, Modern Language Association Press. 

Arthur Golden’s [ City College City University of New York] Passage to Lesser than India: Structure and Meaning in Whitman’s “Passage to India”, PMLA, October 1973, Volume. 88, No. 5, pp. 1095-1103, Modern Language Association

David Daiches’s Lincoln and Whitman, Johrbuch for Amerikastudien, 1996, pp. 15-28

VOLCANO

Nowdawn. When this

grayed welldone sky

resumes to rare,

and – sudden flare! —

awakes my wife’s

night-dormant kiss.

SOLSTICES

(after Hwang Jini)

Take one half the night

of the shortest winter day

and wrap it in your arms,

a prudent negligee

to unfold one brief summer night

when you hold me in your arms.

WE GAMBLERS OF FATE ARE PLAYED BY THE JUGGLERS OF TIME

The silence of echoes is too loud to hear.

The excess deer were culled

before the hunt was closed.

We race toward that precipice we screened ourselves from.

Lazarus’ miracle

just delayed the dust.

We are partners of the same condition.

Though odds up and fall

our lots have been tossed.

The future always lies to us, but so does the past.

You get the apple

filling – You get the crust.

Paths twist and twist no matter which we pick.

You get the pedestal–

and You get the bust.

Rivers have many tributaries but only one result.

You get the sadist’s fuel,

You the holocaust.

JOINT MANEUVERS

Di dandles her tea like any grande dame

and she handles her whiskey as well

as a man.

I was a sergeant in the cavaliers.

I prized my targets

and my bandoleer,

my spurs

and my plume.

A chest of medals occupied

my room, none claimed in battle.

Di was a waitress.

She wanted to stop pretending princess

rise top.

and to the

One with ambition seeks one with regret.

“To starve the kitchen, feed a cook’s credit.”

One day when marching my tattoos

and flutes,

my eyes kept watching Di’s

bonnet and boots.

My parade dismissed,

this hungry soldier,

Sir Knight on a quest,

double-timed over to where she still stood.

As fierce

and as free

as fire from a woods,

Di saluted me

with crisp precision.

I saluted her back

stiff at attention–

never felt the flac

exploding

inside.

The wounded man

wed the ambushing bride.

And I never fled

the combat that came.

My new purple heart

marked my

rise to fame

and Di’s

state of art.

As I rose in rank it was her mission

to protect my flank and her position.

One with ambition

needs

one with regret.

“To starve the kitchen, feed a cook’s credit.”

Di’s deft riding crop

urges her stallion to boldly gallop

beyond battalions.

BELLY/MIND

Sponge draws, stone withstands

inspiration rains.

A formlessness hides

undiscovered forms;

imagination

is the belly’s mind.

Stars reign in darkness.

To pay heaven court,

astronomer’s scope

always magnifies

observatories.

But when the mind fasts,

it’s inspiration

that’s the mind’s belly.

Palaces empty

without their nobles —

poor indeed are those

whose poems outnumber

their inspirations

…

WOMEN
 
A shining sphere emerges
Flags moved by a breath
It comes from the roots, 
From that wind with which we were born, 

There in paradise 
Perfect crowning for our geometry, 
Adamantine, constellated, urgent 
More tenacious than anger 
Woman who breaks like a mirror 
Against the heart of an invisible sun,
 
And you bloom chewing the tide... 
So satiated with dreams that there is no art more tender than yours 
Shadows, abandonments, and prodigious love 
They form your grace. 
Harmonious, flexible, firm woman, 
With silences followed by pure acts
Today I revere what I am…WE ARE. 
WOMEN 



GRACIELA NOEMI VILLAVERDE is a writer and poet from Concepción del Uruguay (Entre Rios) Argentina, based in Buenos Aires She graduated in letters and is the author of seven books of poetry, awarded several times worldwide. She works as the World Manager of Educational and Social Projects of the Hispanic World Union of Writers. 

She's the UHE World Honorary President of the same institution Activa de la Sade, Argentine Society of Writers. Commissioner of honor in the executive cabinet IN THE EDUCATIONAL AND SOCIAL RELATIONS DIVISION, of the UNACCC SOUTH AMERICA ARGENTINA CHAPTER.