Poetry by Rowan Evans

✦ Author’s Note ✦

This piece was born from exhaustion, from the bone-deep ache of being the keeper of others’ ruins while my own remain untouched.
It isn’t a prayer for rescue—it’s a confession that even when we splinter, we still speak, still love, still remain.
Thank you for reading my broken gospel.

✦ Content & Care Advisory ✦

These words dwell in shadows of grief, loss, and the ache of unseen burdens. They speak of sorrow, despair, and the fragile pulse of the human heart. Read only if you feel steady, and remember—your safety, your breath, your life are sacred. You are not alone in the dark.

✦ Invocation ✦

Before you read, know this was never meant to save me.
These words were built from splinters,
stitched together by loneliness and the quiet ache of being unseen.
If they cut, let them cut honest—
for this gospel was written in the language of fracture.

Splinter Gospel
Poetry by Rowan Evans

This depression
is pressin’
down on my lungs.
And I can’t breathe.

I gasp and gasp,
trying to grasp
any reason to stay alive—
when I just want to die.

I’m never enough.
Always too much.
My life is a constant
fucking contradiction,
a paradox—

I am always the shoulder,
never the lover—
always the one who stays,
but easily replaced.

I am the prayer they whisper
when loneliness gnaws,
but never the answer
they keep when dawn comes.

I am always the fixer,
the one who pieces them back together—
only to be left in the dust.
An afterthought.

I hold their ruins,
but no one holds mine.
A vessel for everyone’s ache—
but never a name they choose to keep.

Even knowing that—
I stick around.
It’s emotional masochism,
I crave the ache, so I—

I stay until I splinter,
then watch them leave,
carrying only the softness
I begged them to see.

✦ Benediction ✦

May your cracks speak louder than your silence.
May your softness outlive those who failed to hold it.
And if your gospel must splinter—
let it still be yours, and yours alone.

✦ Read Next (Suggestions) ✦

[Cry to the Quiet] — Sacred Desperation
[Luminescence & Shadow] — A Forbidden Litany
[A-Woman] — Confession at the Altar of Her
[Reliquary of Broken Sons] — A Vignette of the Broken Saint & Clown Prince

Or explore the full archive in [The Library of Ashes]—and if your own confession aches to be written, [commission a custom poem here]. NGCR25 at checkout to get 25% off your ‘request’…