This is a book of poems written over 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 written 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 something simple: 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 body settling. It is the mind coming back into place. It is the moment things stop spinning enough that you can be in your own life again. It is not permanent. It comes and goes.
This collection is dedicated to “all those on a spiritual path, healing from various mental health disorders, trauma, addiction and co-dependence.” That dedication reflects the conditions under which many of these poems were written. The work does not stand above struggle. It comes from within it.
Publishing this book is an act of honesty. The poems show what it looked like to continue without disappearing, to stay present through periods that might otherwise have gone silent. Writing became a way to keep track of what was happening, to hold experience in one place long enough to see it. Some pieces are raw, some unsettled, some fragile, but each stands as it was written. They were not meant to impress. They were meant to remain real.
Across the years, the voice changes. At times it fractures, questions, pulls back. At other moments it steadies and begins to see more clearly. What shifts is not just tone, but the relationship to what is happening—from confusion toward recognition, from endurance toward something more livable. The poems don’t explain this movement. They mark it.
If you live with trauma, identity struggle, repression, dissociation, or that sense of being split from yourself, some pages may feel familiar. Not because they offer answers, but because they don’t hide what’s there. And if your path has been different, the book may still offer something simple: a record of someone staying.
Consider this a small doorway into the work. Enter if you want. Take what speaks to you and leave what doesn’t. The book doesn’t ask to be interpreted. It just exists.
When I am clean is available on Amazon.
→ Read more about When I am clean on the official site.
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