Xopher Jim was the pen name that I used in high school and into my early twenty’s. It was an alias I formed which gave me a layer of separation between what I was writing and what I was feeling. For me I didn’t have to experience every emotion that I wrote about, I just had to understand it and be able to articulate what I thought. Over the years my writing has dwindled. It’s been put aside for this thing called life. This collection of poems in my book "Sides of Life" encompasses the different sides of life that I saw between ages of 18 – 29. High school love and heartbreak, the military, the loss of my brother, my growth as a man, meeting the love of my life and my first glimpse of fatherhood.