All Pain Is The Same. Only The

The War Tried To Kill Us In The Spring. As Grass Greened The Plains Of Nineveh And The Weather Warmed, We Patrolled The Low-slung Hills Beyond The Cities And Towns. We Moved Over Them And Through The Tall Grass On Faith, Kneading Paths Into The Windswept Growth Like Pioneers. While We Slept, The War Rubbed Its Thousand Ribs Against The Ground In Prayer.

All Pain Is The Same. Only The Details Are Different.

Noises And Smells, Those Can Bring Back Powerful Memories. I Remember When I Was Going To School One Fourth Of July, And There Were A Lot Of Fireworks Going Off. I Knew That I Was In Richmond. I Knew That I Was A College Student. But I Thought People Were Shooting At Me.

There's Something Immediate About The Experience Of Reading A Poem. It Makes Sense In My Own Mind, But I'm Trying To Figure Out A Way To Articulate It... It's Like Looking At A Painting: You're Able To Take In The Totality Of The Work All At Once, And So Processing Whatever Information That Painting Is Giving You Is Almost Secondary To Simply Apprehending What's In Front Of You.

There Are Definitely Connections Between Poems, But I Wanted Each To Stand On Its Own. I Guess It Goes Back To The Idea Of Trying To Zoom In And Out, And To Modulate, So There Are Different Ways Of Looking At Any Experience For The Reader. Even Having Short Poems And Long Poems - There Has To Be Some Kind Of Variation In The Experience Of Reading As A Whole.