Every book has a beginning.

Sometimes it begins with an idea, a dream, or a single sentence. For me, The Raven’s Poison began long before I ever knew I was writing a book. In fact, it began before I even understood that what I was writing was poetry.

I grew up with my mother constantly in and out of the hospital. My parents were divorced, my sister was the oldest, and I was the youngest. My mother needed a liver transplant, and although the transplant gave her years she otherwise might not have had, the medications she took over time eventually damaged her kidneys.

When I was young, I remember being told, “She won’t live long.”

Those words stayed somewhere inside me.

Yet my mother defied that expectation. She became the longest-living recipient of a liver transplant at the time, living for twelve years after her transplant. She passed away in 1994.

I was twenty years old.

When I was fourteen, I moved in with my father. I still remember sitting in the car with my mother when she was crying and telling me that it made sense for me to go. I didn’t fully understand everything that was happening around me. I only knew that something in my life was changing, and I didn’t know how to process it.

So I began writing.

I didn’t call it poetry. I didn’t think of myself as a poet. I simply wrote down what I couldn’t say.

Those early words became a place where I could put my confusion, grief, anger, loneliness, and everything else I didn’t have the language for. Looking back now, I realize that poetry had found me before I ever realized I was searching for it.

Eventually, I dropped out of college. I felt lost, and I moved in with my girlfriend at the time. She was an artistic person studying photography in college, and she appreciated my writing. She encouraged that part of me.

But my life wasn’t in a good place.

Somewhere along the way, I became someone I wasn’t.

A few years later, I moved back home to try to put my life back together. I returned to school and began rebuilding myself. Eventually, I met a woman at my brother’s wedding. We fell in love, married, and began a life together. She had a daughter when we met, and over the years, our family grew in its own complicated way.

Throughout much of my marriage, I hid my poetry.

I kept that part of myself tucked away.

Over the years, my marriage began to unravel. My wife became an alcoholic, and somewhere along the way, we drifted apart. My father had also struggled with alcoholism, and I began to recognize patterns in my own life that I hadn’t understood before.

I also had to confront something about myself.

I was immature. I lacked the courage and confidence to speak honestly about what was happening. I didn’t know how to set boundaries. I didn’t know how to stand up for myself.

Then her daughter witnessed her mother drunk.

That changed everything.

During the divorce, my ex-wife attempted suicide while her daughter was in the house. Her daughter called me, and I walked her through what to do. At the same time, I was struggling to hold myself together.

That was when I realized I needed help.

I went to therapy.

For a year, I sat with someone and began confronting parts of myself that I had spent years avoiding. I continued writing. Slowly, I began understanding that writing wasn’t simply something I did—it was one of the ways I understood my life.

Therapy taught me something important:

You cannot change what you refuse to face.

I began setting goals. I learned to make short-term goals and long-term goals. I learned to be more honest with myself. I learned that healing doesn’t mean forgetting what happened. Sometimes healing means finally allowing yourself to understand what happened.

A few years after my divorce, I learned that my ex-wife had lost her job, lost her home, and ultimately died by suicide.

There are experiences in life that don’t fit neatly into words.

Grief is one of them.

Therapy helped me finally begin dealing with the grief of losing my mother—grief I had carried for years without truly confronting. I had spent so much of my life moving forward that I never realized how much of my past was still following me.

I learned that there is no expiration date on grief.

You can carry something for decades and still eventually find a way to put it down.

Eventually, I remarried. I found someone who supported my dreams, encouraged my goals, and allowed me to become more fully myself.

And somewhere along that journey, I returned to my writing.

That brings me to The Raven’s Poison.

This book isn’t simply a collection of poems. It represents the choices we make—and the choices we don’t make. It represents the patterns we inherit, the patterns we repeat, and the patterns we eventually learn to break.

There is darkness in these pages, but there is also growth.

There is pain, but there is also hope.

There are things I wish I had done differently. There are things I wish I had understood sooner. But I have learned that regret doesn’t have to become a life sentence.

We are never too old to change.

We are never too old to learn.

We are never too old to become someone better than the person we were yesterday.

The Raven’s Poison is, in many ways, a reflection of that belief.

The raven represents the things that follow us—the memories, mistakes, grief, fears, and patterns that can become almost like shadows. The poison represents what happens when we allow those things to remain inside us unchecked.

But poison doesn’t have to be the end of the story.

We can choose to confront it.

We can choose to heal.

We can choose differently.

Today, I am in a place I never thought I would be. I have a wife and a son whom I deeply love. I have goals. I have dreams. I write. And perhaps most importantly, I am still working on myself.

I don’t believe any of us ever truly finish that work.

The Raven’s Poison is my reminder of that.

It is a book born from loss, mistakes, grief, relationships, choices, and ultimately, growth.

It is a reminder that our past may explain us, but it doesn’t have to define us.

And sometimes, the words we write while we’re trying to survive become the very words that help us understand how we lived.