This is a book of poems written over a period of 26 years, sometimes in the middle of the storm, sometimes in the quiet after. The dates matter because the book is not a performance of a single mood. It is a record of survival, and then, slowly, a record of integration. What appears here was not composed from a distance, but from within experience as it unfolded, often without certainty, sometimes without resolution, but with persistence.
The title comes from a poem that names a simple truth: when clarity returns, the world changes shape. “when I am clean / nothing seems bad… when I am clean / I sing… the world / becomes serene.” The word clean is not about perfection or sobriety. It is about presence. It is the nervous system loosening its grip. It is the mind returning to the body. It is the moment the inner room stops spinning and the self becomes inhabitable again. It is not a permanent state, but a return, sometimes brief, sometimes hard-won.
This collection is dedicated “for all those on a spiritual path, healing from various mental health disorders, trauma, addiction and co-dependence.” That dedication is not symbolic. It reflects the conditions under which many of these poems were written. The work does not stand above struggle; it emerges from within it, shaped by lived experience rather than reflection alone.
Publishing this book is an act of honesty. The poems show what it looked like to continue without vanishing, to remain present through periods that might otherwise have dissolved into silence. Writing became a form of continuity, a place where experience could exist without fragmentation, where the self could remain threaded across time. Some pieces are raw, some unsettled, some fragile, but each stands as it was meant to stand. They were never intended to impress. They were written to remain real.
Across the years, the voice shifts. At times it fractures, questions, withdraws. At other moments it steadies, observes, and gathers itself. What changes is not only the tone, but the relationship to experience: from confusion toward recognition, from containment toward integration, from endurance toward quiet coherence. The poems do not narrate this movement directly, but they trace it, sometimes faintly, sometimes clearly, across the passing of years.
If you live with trauma, identity struggle, repression, dissociation, or the inner separation that can accompany deep searching, some pages may feel familiar. Not because they offer solutions, but because they refuse disguise. And if your path has been different, the book may still offer something simple: the presence of a witness, and the reminder that language can sometimes hold what feels unholdable.
Consider this a small doorway into the work. Enter gently, if you choose. Take what speaks to you and leave what does not. The book asks for no interpretation. Its existence is already its meaning.
– Jason Elijah
When I am clean is available on Amazon.
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