Stories about parallel selves usually go for drama: the evil double, the duel, the cosmic stakes. Dave Bonta's «I and I» opts for a diner, a crowded apartment and a dozen cats. The speaker meets a version of himself from "an alternate universe," and what they share is a quiet, awkward comparison of lives, closer to a reunion between estranged relatives than to science fiction.
The title is the first clue. "I and I" sets two first-person pronouns side by side, joined by "and" as equals, with neither demoted to "me." That equality drives the poem. Neither man is the original or the copy, and the poem never says whose life turned out better. It starts on a note of mutual wariness: "We greet each other cautiously." The adverb is stiff and slightly formal, the way two strangers might behave, which is funny because they are the same person.
The central difference is introduced with a deliberate understatement: "There's a slight class difference." Slight is the wrong word, and the poem knows it. One self "flipped burgers at the diner," the other "went to graduate school / & now teaches cultural studies." The two jobs are placed in parallel clauses, but the details that follow complicate any simple ranking. The academic's life is not glamorous. He shares an apartment "with two housemates & a dozen cats," a comic image that suggests some precariousness. Judging by the details, the success on offer here is modest and a little untidy. Still, the speaker watches "in wonder" as his double gives "a good-night kiss / to a woman black as coffee." The wonder seems to be at the ordinariness of the intimacy, a domestic tenderness the speaker has not witnessed in his own version of events. The coffee simile is a curious choice. It echoes the diner the speaker came from, as if his imagination can only describe this new world in the vocabulary of the old one.
The poem's turn comes in its most casual line: "I gave up poetry years ago, he says." There are no quotation marks, so the speech slides into the narration the way voices do in dreams. The irony is sharp. The man with the degree and the career abandoned poetry, while the burger-flipper, who is presumably the one telling us all this, kept it. The poem itself is evidence. This line suggests that every path costs something, and that the speaker's apparently lesser life protected something his double lost.
The ending adds a final reversal. The academic asks "what I've done / to make my beard turn white." The question is half curiosity, half accusation, with "what I've done" implying that a life leaves marks and someone is responsible for them. The poem stops there, with no waking and no answer. We are left in the doorway between dream and morning, which the opening phrase, "my last dream before waking," has prepared us for.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter. Its short lines, mostly plain declarative sentences, read like a dream being retold over breakfast, flat and precise, trusting the strangeness of the content to do the work. The line breaks occasionally play with this. "I meet a version of myself" ends the line on an ordinary note, and then "from an alternate universe" arrives almost as an afterthought, deflating the sci-fi phrase. The single ampersand in "& now teaches" gives the text a hasty, jotted-down feel, as if it were copied straight from a notebook by the bed.
What makes the poem significant is how it handles a familiar premise. The "what if I'd chosen differently?" question is usually asked with regret or fantasy. Here it becomes a lightly comic, honest look at how class and vocation shape a self, and at how each version of us might envy the other. The speaker comes away neither triumphant nor defeated, only more aware of the other life he might have led and the white beard that belongs to the one he did.