There are poems where I sit down with a very serious idea and carefully shape every word.
This isn’t one of those poems.
Draggin’ (Ignis) is me letting the pen run loose, throwing references at the page, flexing a little, and then immediately making fun of myself for doing it. It’s playful bravado with a gothic streak, a little battle-rap energy, and absolutely no intention of pretending I’m cooler than I am.
Twenty-three years of writing will do strange things to a poet.
Apparently, it makes them compare themselves to dragons, superheroes, and Pokémon-level fire hazards.
Enjoy the chaos.
— Rowan Evans
Twenty-three years of writing and this is what the pen decided to do with all that experience.
Draggin’ (Ignis) Poetry by Rowan Evans
Twenty-three years, I’ve been doing this
with craft in my veins and trauma in my brain—
I’ve really been through some shit.
Maybe that’s why I write so ruthless—
if I spit a diss, it’d be ignis—I’d be draggin’ you,
but I’m nice, so I’m a dragon like Toothless.
This is stupid, silly, dumb—
I can’t take me serious, and this is how come.
Yeah, these might be jokes—
but I’m cold, Bobby Drake,
so shut your mouth
before I turn your girl into a—
Dragon Rider…
That kind of killed the rhyme,
that’s fine—
here’s a few more lines…
I’m too quick-witted—
pen faster than Flash,
I’m too quick wit’ it
when I write lines
to silence critics.
I’ve been writing for years,
double digits—
two followed by the number
that comes next—
I’m not even trying to flex,
this is just me writing facts.
Journey into the Hexverse
[Behind These Bars (Idol Chatter)] A playful battle-poetry piece where confidence, wordplay, pop-culture references, and a sharp pen collide. Behind These Bars (Idol Chatter) turns verbal sparring into a ridiculous little poetry showdown.
[Kaio-ken/Zenkai] Two Dragon Ball-inspired battle poems about creative power, survival, and coming back stronger. Kaio-ken with a Pen brings the attack, while Zenkai (Stronger Now) delivers the aftermath: push me to the edge, and I’ll return stronger than before.
[Don’t Push Me] A playful battle-poetry piece about turning insults into punchlines, standing your ground, and refusing to be intimidated. Don’t Push Me mixes swagger, humor, rhyme, and Rowan Evans’ signature self-aware interruptions.
[B.S.T.F.U.] A playful battle-poetry exercise packed with insults, internal rhymes, punchlines, wordplay, and literary swagger. B.S.T.F.U. is Rowan Evans flexing the verbal muscles—not calling out anyone in particular.
Sometimes the nightmare is waking up and realizing that the person you want beside you is standing beneath a completely different sky.
My Nightmare comes from that place—the uneasy space between memory and hope, between what once felt shared and what now feels impossibly far away. It is a poem about distance, but not only the physical kind. There is distance between perspectives, between hearts, between the lives we imagine and the lives we are actually living.
Still, even nightmares have endings.
Sometimes you wake up before they become permanent.
And sometimes, even while dreaming, you can still see a little gold threaded through the cracks.
— Rowan Evans
Two shores. Two skies. One horizon—and enough gold left to believe they might meet there.
My Nightmare Poetry by Rowan Evans
This is my nightmare.
You and I across the distance,
the view that we see is different—
your moon from my sky
is missing—
the sun no longer shines,
it’s dimming—
I don’t see the spark anymore—
don’t see the light in the dark anymore.
What do I even I write for?
I lost my purpose—think I did it on purpose,
it’s like I can’t rhyme anymore,
no clock, no watch, can’t tell time anymore.
This is my nightmare.
You and I across the distance,
the view that we see is different—
my moon is sickly pale,
but yours seems fine though—
the sun doesn’t provide light,
it’s gotten real low—
in times before, this is when
I would Kintsugi the heart—
but there’s not much heart left,
it’s all gold—soft metal,
softer soul—stayed warm,
when the world grew cold.
This is my nightmare.
You and I across the distance,
the view that we see is different—
when we used to be,
two pieces the puzzle
was missing—
the sun in the sky was fine,
but it dimmed in our shine—
I’ve spent time doing Kintsugi
on your heart too—it was hard not to,
gold and platinum weaved through—
I really did see you, flaws and all—
and all I saw was a gift from God.
I still don’t think—
I was wrong.
But that was my nightmare…
You and I across the distance,
the view that we saw was different—
but I still see the gold threads that connect,
the platinum hope on the horizon,
that one day the distance will close—
and we’ll walk the same shore,
it won’t be—
mine and yours.
Journey into the Hexverse…
[Dreaming Wrong] A familiar dream becomes unsettling when the ocean becomes a pond, the tide disappears, the moon loses its reflection, and nothing feels quite like it belongs. Dreaming Wrong explores the uncanny feeling of finding yourself inside a dream that looks familiar—but feels like someone else’s.
[Poet’s Curse] Poet’s Curse explores the painful side of falling too deeply: giving pieces of yourself away freely, taking accountability for your own heartbreak, and realizing that learning to let go can be harder than learning to love.
[Beach to Beach] A dream becomes a journey between familiar shores and unfamiliar cities in Beach to Beach (How I Get There), a poem about imagined travel, ocean crossings, longing, and the places we hope to someday reach while awake.
[Where the Metaphors Lead] Some truths are easier to write than they are to say aloud. “Where the Metaphors Lead” explores the quiet space between dreams, confession, and the courage it takes to let another person know how deeply they’ve become woven into your inner world.
Others arrive already carrying the scent of decay.
These two minimalist pieces were written as companions—two sides of the same creative process. One looks toward cultivation, growth, and the strange beauty of watching an idea become something tangible. The other looks toward the thoughts that come darker, older, or already beginning to rot.
Together, Rose and Ruin sit in the same garden.
One grows.
One decays.
Both become poetry.
— Rowan Evans
Rose & Ruin Poems by Rowan Evans
Somewhere between ink and imagination, the garden begins to bloom.
Rose Poetry by Rowan Evans
I plant a seed and water it,
creativity and ink, fertilizing it—
watching masterpieces bloom
in a garden of thoughts.
Even the thoughts that rot can still become something worth writing.
Ruin Poetry by Rowan Evans
I use ’em—
before the thoughts rot,
but I’m a gothic poet—
I’ll still use the rotten thoughts,
I see the world through ’em.
Journey into the Hexverse…
[Conductor] A dark, intimate poem about the strange power words can have over the reader—where rhythm, rhyme, and line breaks become instruments capable of reaching beyond the page.
[The Answer Is (Yes)] What kind of writer am I? Mythmaker, confessor, comedian, philosopher, dream-architect, romantic, storyteller, and diss-poet. This self-reflective poem explores the impossibility of fitting creativity into a single category—and embraces every version of the truth a pen can touch.
[Finish What You Started] A dark introspective poem about confronting the past, carrying old versions of yourself, and realizing that the only way forward is through the fire.
And then there are poems that quietly reach through the page and take hold of something you thought belonged entirely to you.
Conductor comes from that space—the strange little boundary between writer and reader, where words stop being marks on a page and start becoming something physical.
I wanted to play with that boundary.
So take a breath before you begin.
Then read.
— Rowan Evans
Some conductors lead an orchestra. Others conduct the breath between the lines.
Conductor Poetry by Rowan Evans
I’m a conductor—
watch me
control your breath.
Won’t even
be in the room—
you just have
to read the words
that I’ve left—
you can feel
my influence
in your chest—
I confess—
you breathe the way I tell you to,
this is what I will do—I will extend the lines,
implement some rhymes—show you,
that your breath is not your own,
it is mine to control—
Journey into the Hexverse…
[The Crypt] A mysterious man watches from a crypt as a woman enters the graveyard and kneels before an unnamed grave. In this compact gothic poem, fascination, death, and possession blur together beneath the shadows of the cemetery.
[Dreaming Wrong] A familiar dream becomes unsettling when the ocean becomes a pond, the tide disappears, the moon loses its reflection, and nothing feels quite like it belongs. Dreaming Wrong explores the uncanny feeling of finding yourself inside a dream that looks familiar—but feels like someone else’s.
[Did You Really Think This Was About Trees?] A playful love poem disguised as a forest of terrible tree puns. Beneath the birch, oak, cedar, palms, lumber, and absurdist wordplay is a poem about devotion, loyalty, laughter, and building a life with someone you love.
Some places don’t just hold the dead—they hold the stories, obsessions, and shadows that refuse to leave them.
The Crypt Poetry by Rowan Evans
Don’t you see—
the one where the crypt sleeps?
The crypt is a man with no soul,
a body with no home, left to roam.
He sleeps in his namesake—
watches the graveyard
from the same place.
He sees her when she walks in.
He can see the gates from there.
“She looks radiant as ever—”
he thinks, as she seems to shrink
with eyes down,
not looking at the world.
He wants to—
when she thinks
nobody is looking,
he really sees her—
she kneels before a grave,
he can’t see the name,
but he’s made his claim—
the crypt will keep her.
Author’s Note
The Crypt is a short gothic piece built around the idea of a place becoming a person—and a person becoming inseparable from the place that bears their name.
The crypt is both a physical location and a metaphorical state: a man who feels emptied out, disconnected from the world, watching life pass from the shadows. When he sees her enter the graveyard, his attention gives him something to focus on, but that fascination quickly becomes something darker.
I wanted the poem to feel almost like a fragment of a larger gothic story—something glimpsed through the gates of a graveyard rather than fully explained. We don’t know who she is visiting, what happened to the crypt’s occupant, or what exactly he means when he decides that “the crypt will keep her.”
That’s intentional.
Some gothic stories are frightening because of what they reveal.
Others are frightening because of what they leave hidden.
— Rowan Evans
Journey into the Hexverse…
[Fallen Angel’s Reckoning (Remix)] Fallen Angel’s Reckoning (Remix) revisits a 2024 poem about heartbreak, broken promises, and falling from an imagined heaven, transforming its original ending into a darker meditation on resilience, self-reclamation, and learning to fly with broken wings.
[Homecoming] Fallen Angel’s Reckoning (Remix) revisits a 2024 poem about heartbreak, broken promises, and falling from an imagined heaven, transforming its original ending into a darker meditation on resilience, self-reclamation, and learning to fly with broken wings.
[The Monster in the Margins II] The Monster in the Margins II transforms Rowan Evans’s Seven Deadly Sins mythology into a horror story written between the lines, where Lust, Wrath, Sloth, Greed, Pride, Envy, and Gluttony become monsters growing from pain, grudges, and scars.
[Pride] ‘Pride’ towers over all else, a seductive and deceptive force. The seventh of the 7 Deadly Sonnets, exploring hubris, self-importance, and the masks we wear.
[Through the Shattered Glass: Before the Glass Shattered] Before the glass shatters, shadows linger and memories twist. Discover the haunting prelude to B.D. Nightshade’s “Through the Shattered Glass” series—where ordinary moments become portals to fractured realities.
Dreaming Wrong came from the strange feeling of being inside a dream that looks familiar but somehow isn’t yours. The moon is still there. The path is still recognizable. The water is still waiting—but everything has been rearranged just enough to make the entire landscape feel wrong.
I wanted to play with that feeling of dream logic: the moment when your mind recognizes the pieces but realizes they no longer fit together. The ocean becomes a pond, the tide disappears, the moon loses its reflection, and even the heavens become impossible to navigate.
For me, the unsettling part isn’t that the dream is frightening. It’s that it feels incorrect. Like waking life has been reconstructed by someone who knows what everything is supposed to look like—but doesn’t quite understand what it means.
Sometimes the strangest dreams aren’t nightmares.
Sometimes they’re simply dreaming wrong.
— Rowan Evans
Sometimes the nightmare isn’t frightening—it is simply familiar enough to feel wrong.
Dreaming Wrong Poetry by Rowan Evans
I slipped from waking life,
drifted into night—
but it felt different,
like the imagery wasn’t right.
The moon looked paler than usual,
so I asked if she was sick—
of course, she didn’t answer back.
But I followed the same paths
that I had many nights before.
I walked along
until I hit the edge of the—
pond?
Where was the ocean at,
where was the shore—
and why couldn’t I
feel the tide anymore?
Everything felt off there.
I was on my knees,
staring at the water—
where was the shimmer,
I couldn’t see the reflection
of the moon—
I looked straight ahead,
and the silence seemed
to stretch further.
Then my eyes looked to the sky
and I realized that I couldn’t
map the path across the heavens.
It’s like as soon my head hit the pillow—
I entered somebody else’s mind,
because nothing about this
felt like mine—
I was dreaming wrong.
That’s the only thing
that can explain,
what was going on.
Journey into the Hexverse…
[Beach to Beach (How I Get There)] A dream becomes a journey between familiar shores and unfamiliar cities in Beach to Beach (How I Get There), a poem about imagined travel, ocean crossings, longing, and the places we hope to someday reach while awake.
[Where the Metaphors Lead] Some truths are easier to write than they are to say aloud. “Where the Metaphors Lead” explores the quiet space between dreams, confession, and the courage it takes to let another person know how deeply they’ve become woven into your inner world.
[The World Shifted Around Us] The world transformed around us—beach, city streets, jungle—but we never moved. Sometimes love isn’t found in words, but in the quiet certainty of someone remaining clear while everything else fades.
[The Streets I Walk When I Sleep] “The Streets I Walk When I Sleep” is a deeply intimate free verse poem about recurring dreams, emotional connection, longing across distance, and the strange feeling of remembering places and moments that have never happened in waking life.
[Across the Page-cific] A playful, autobiographical journey through the strange places poetry can take me—from sandwich heartbreak and pasta diss poems to gothic monsters, mythology, ravens, ghosts, and storms across the page. Beneath the absurdity is something deeply personal: the realization that writing gave me a way to rebuild myself, piece by piece.
Sometimes I genuinely wonder what happens when I give my brain permission to write whatever it wants.
The answer, apparently, is sandwiches, pasta, farmers on Pluto, raccoons in silk pajamas, llamas, trees, cartoon ghosts, monsters, seven deadly sins, and a journey across an ocean that does not technically exist.
And honestly?
I love it.
Across the Page-cific (Chasing Storms) is a celebration of the strange places my writing can go when I stop trying to force it into a single shape.
This poem deliberately references several of my recent pieces and recurring worlds. The sandwich wordplay comes from Lost in the Sauce. The pasta-based literary assault comes from Impasta (A Diss in Pasta Form). The trees point back to my playful botanical wordplay, while Danny Phantom, the Monster in the Margins, the Seven Deadly Sonnets, ravens, spirits, and other imagery come from the larger mythology and vocabulary I’ve been building throughout my work.
The references aren’t just Easter eggs.
They’re evidence.
Evidence of how much my writing has changed—and how much more willing I am now to let different parts of my voice coexist.
For a long time, I thought I needed to choose what kind of writer I was supposed to be.
Gothic poet.
Confessional poet.
Love poet.
Dark poet.
Funny poet.
Experimental poet.
But the more I write, the less interested I am in choosing.
I want to write the heartbreak poem with sandwich ingredients.
I want Tony Stanza to write a pasta diss.
I want to turn mythology into autobiography.
I want to write about ghosts and gods, then turn around and make a terrible pun.
I want to chase a metaphor until it becomes absurd.
And then, underneath all of it, I want to find something honest.
That is what the storms in this poem represent.
The chaotic lines.
The sudden cadence changes.
The ideas that arrive from nowhere.
The parts of my mind that refuse to walk in a straight line.
I used to think I needed to calm those storms down.
Now?
I chase them.
Because writing has become a playground again.
And somewhere in that playground, I keep finding pieces of myself I hadn’t finished discovering.
“It was writing that saved me” is therefore not a throwaway line.
Writing gave me a language for experiences I couldn’t always explain directly. It gave me somewhere to put the contradictions, the humor, the darkness, the questions, the love, the anger, the absurdity, and everything else that makes up the person behind the pen.
Piece by piece.
Bit by bit.
I rebuilt myself in the art.
And apparently, sometimes that art looks like a sandwich, a bowl of pasta, and a storm on the Pacific.
I’ll take it.
— Rowan Evans
I stopped trying to avoid the storms. I started chasing them across the page.
Across the Page-cific (Chasing Storms) Poetry by Rowan Evans
Let’s see, what other ridiculous thing
can we turn into poetry—
I’ve written a heartbreak poem
using sandwich ingredients,
and wrote a diss poem
using nothing but pasta noodles—
was a farmer on Pluto,
witnessed raccoons in silk pajamas
perched on the backs of llamas—
while I shaped love poems
out of the trees—
I’ve turned Danny Phantom
into religion—a whole faith
on “going ghost”—
but really it’s just me stuck
between worlds.
I’ve written as the monster in the margins
and the spirits in the room—
seven sins that act like tax on the soul.
Go against the monster, you won’t leave whole.
Feeling like Pennywise, grin wide,
’cause I’m a clown in my rhymes
sometimes—
I’ve taken trips
in ink-dipped ships
across the page-cific—
avoiding storms of chaotic lines
and jagged rhymes
with sudden cadence changes.
Just kidding—
I chased the storms across the page,
embraced the pace my brain gave.
It was writing that saved me—
it gave me a way to translate me,
piece by piece and bit by bit,
I rebuilt myself in the art of lit—
where a mind like mine appears rarely.
Journey into the Hexverse…
[Lost in the Sauce] A playful heartbreak poem where sandwiches, ketchup, mustard, rye, lettuce, and sourdough become metaphors for emotional confusion. Beneath the food puns is a speaker trying to understand how everything went from “we’re okay” to suddenly feeling cold.
[Impasta] Tony Stanza is back with another literary attack—and this time, he’s bringing pasta. Spaghetti, fettuccine, macaroni, ravioli, and angel hair become weapons in a ridiculous diss aimed at a poet whose rhymes are allegedly cheesy, fragile, and completely impasta.
[Pluto Farmer] A whimsical absurdist poem about being a certified weirdo, farming space carrots on Pluto, and refusing to fit into anyone else’s definition of “normal.”
[Raccoons in Silk Pajamas] What begins with judgmental Space Chickens quickly spirals into camels in parked cars, elephants in jam jars, raccoons in silk pajamas, and astronauts in the ocean. A playful absurdist poem about language, imagination, and what happens when you stop trying to control where the words go.
[Did You Really Think This Was About Trees?] A playful love poem disguised as a forest of terrible tree puns. Beneath the birch, oak, cedar, palms, lumber, and absurdist wordplay is a poem about devotion, loyalty, laughter, and building a life with someone you love.
[Danny Phantom Theology] What begins as a metaphor borrowed from a childhood cartoon becomes something deeper: a reflection on existing between survival and possibility, exhaustion and hope, the life we have and the life we long for. Danny Phantom Theology explores what it means to keep moving toward a future that feels worth living.
[The Monster in the Margins II] The Monster in the Margins II transforms Rowan Evans’s Seven Deadly Sins mythology into a horror story written between the lines, where Lust, Wrath, Sloth, Greed, Pride, Envy, and Gluttony become monsters growing from pain, grudges, and scars.
Some poems begin with a carefully constructed metaphor.
This one began with a step-ladder.
And then immediately refused to behave.
Blended Hardware is intentionally ridiculous. I started with a simple object and let my mind wander wherever the language wanted to take it: ladders became hoses, hoses became an excuse for a terrible joke, friendship became Star Wars, Obi-Wan became a teacher, Luke became Leia, and suddenly I was revisiting different versions of myself across my writing history.
That wandering is the point.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much more playful my relationship with language has become. I don’t always sit down with a destination in mind anymore. Sometimes I just start writing and see what happens.
This poem is one of those moments.
It also became a strange little conversation between different versions of Rowan. The fifteen-year-old writer appears briefly, the Gothic voice tries to take over, and the present-day me immediately interrupts to tell her to calm the hell down.
That self-interruption is probably one of my favorite parts of the piece.
I can write something dramatic and immediately recognize that I have made the moment far more Gothic than it needs to be.
I can make a joke, realize the joke went somewhere questionable, and then literally put myself on trial inside the poem.
That is part of what makes writing feel like a playground again.
I don’t have to protect every poem from being silly.
I don’t have to make every metaphor profound.
I don’t have to prove that every line deserves to exist.
Sometimes I can just follow a thought until it becomes a garden hose, an Obi-Wan reference, a fifteen-year-old version of myself, and an increasingly concerned author asking whether she accidentally threatened somebody.
And honestly?
That’s enough.
— Rowan Evans
Sometimes you start with a step-ladder and end up somewhere completely different.
Blended Hardware Poetry by Rowan Evans
This is my step-ladder.
I call it a step-ladder, because I had another ladder before—
and yeah, I got plenty hose— different shapes and different sizes, some are six feet, some are four— I’m glad I only have two outside faucets, ’cause I wouldn’t have plenty hose, if I had one more. (I only have two hoses.)
You’re not just my homie, you’re my Obi-wan Kenobi— and I’m Luke, mixed with Leia. That means you’re my teacher, and my only hope, playa.
(I’m sorry for that, truly. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m going to… I’m going to put the pen down now.)
SIKE! I lied like it’s 1999— four more years and the myth would start, a poet born with a blackened heart.
(Dial back, that was too gothic for this piece.)
I mean, sike… I lied like it’s 2005— and I’m fifteen with a pen again, two years into the journey mapping how I’d survive—
and I mean me, not them— I’m talking the person they’d grow into. The person I’d caution you, against taking a pen to—
that’s a battle you wouldn’t win, boo.
(Wait…
was that a threat?
In a joke poem?
Too far, Rowan… too far.)
Journey into the Hexverse…
[Not the Way Jesus Did] A provocative poem about religious judgment, hypocrisy, outcasts, and the contradiction between preaching compassion and condemning those who live differently.
[Noon is Loud] If four in the morning belongs to truth, then noon belongs to impossible memories. Noon Is Loud is a playful free verse poem filled with absurd boasts, pop culture references, and tongue-in-cheek mythology that explores how easily imagination can rewrite reality.
[Content Warning] What if you reviewed a person the way you’d review a terrible novel? Content Warning is a playful, satirical poem that uses literary criticism as the ultimate roast, proving that sometimes the sharpest metaphor is also the funniest.
[Chemical X] Chemical X explores the rapid, associative way one creative mind moves—from cartoons to sports, comic books to music—revealing that inspiration isn’t linear, but a collision of memory, humor, rhythm, and intuition.
[Off Leash Thought] A reflective free verse poem exploring the mind as a living, wandering force—unpredictable, creative, and sometimes chaotic—through the metaphor of a dog off leash. It embraces mental drift not as a flaw, but as a natural part of creative thought and self-awareness.
Some poems don’t need to be abandoned when we outgrow the person who originally wrote them.
Sometimes they need to be revisited.
Undead Symphony (Remix) returns to a poem I originally wrote on June 13, 2024. The original was written from a place I understood intimately: feeling perpetually misplaced, overlooked, and emotionally exhausted while still carrying an enormous capacity for empathy underneath the numbness.
The title came from that contradiction.
An undead thing is neither fully alive nor truly dead. A symphony, meanwhile, is full of movement, emotion, tension, and sound. Put those ideas together and you get something that feels very close to the emotional state I was trying to describe: a person who can feel deeply while simultaneously becoming distant from the world around them.
That contradiction is still here in 2026.
What changed is the way I approach it.
The remix gives the poem more room to breathe. I broke apart lines that had previously been compressed together, allowing certain thoughts to linger rather than rushing past them. I also sharpened some of the imagery and cadence, particularly around the relationship between solitude, apathy, and empathy.
The original poem said what I was feeling.
The remix feels more like I understand why I was saying it.
And that distinction matters.
I have spent a lot of time in my writing exploring darkness—not because darkness is all I have, but because I have always been fascinated by the strange things that can survive inside it. Undead Symphony is one of those pieces.
Apathy and empathy shouldn’t fit together.
Yet somehow, they do.
One protects the heart by making the world feel distant.
The other keeps reaching toward it anyway.
That tension is the symphony.
The speaker may feel undead, but the music never actually stops.
— Rowan Evans
Somewhere between apathy and empathy, something inside me keeps making music.
Undead Symphony (Remix) Poetry by Rowan Evans [written on July 23, 2026]
It was always the wrong place,
wrong time—
I was always second best,
never first place—
Never the one to win the race,
I was always the one they laughed at,
never with—
always the one that
when they were gone—
never missed.
So I grew cold and distant
like far-off summer nights,
yearned for on cold winter mornings.
And sometimes—
it still feels hard to breathe,
like a shadow in the light,
fading beneath.
I never was one for faith,
I never believed,
no thoughts and no prayers—
because why should anybody care?
In a crowd I felt alone,
a silent voice,
an empty phone.
It’s apathy—
and I pair it with my empathy.
An odd dance of light and dark,
within me.
It’s beauty in the darkness,
an undead symphony.
But still—I dream of a place,
where I’m more than just a face.
A spark in the night,
a fleeting glimpse
of warmth in the cold,
and strength in the struggle.
I remember moments—
fleeting and rare,
of laughter shared,
of someone who cared.
Brief as they were,
they lit up my sky,
A reminder that even shadows can try.
Yet—
I return to the solitude I know,
where apathy is my only show.
But my empathy,
a hidden grace—
whispers of a longing for a different place.
It’s a contradiction,
a twisted art—
to feel so much,
with a guarded heart.
An undead symphony,
a haunting tune—
a dance of shadows beneath the moon.
Journey into the Hexverse…
[Fallen Angel’s Reckoning (Remix)] Fallen Angel’s Reckoning (Remix) revisits a 2024 poem about heartbreak, broken promises, and falling from an imagined heaven, transforming its original ending into a darker meditation on resilience, self-reclamation, and learning to fly with broken wings.
Sometimes an old poem doesn’t need to be left in the past.
Sometimes you have to return to it after you’ve changed.
Fallen Angel’s Reckoning (Remix) revisits a poem I originally wrote on June 6, 2024. The original was already telling a story I understood well: love that promised forever, a fall from an imagined heaven, and the painful process of reclaiming yourself after the promise disappears.
But I was a different writer when I wrote it.
And, more importantly, I was a different person.
The 2026 version isn’t meant to erase the original. It is a conversation with it.
I kept the central imagery—the angel, Lucifer, the fall from heaven, the halo, the darkness, the broken vow—because those symbols still belong to the emotional architecture of the piece. But I wanted to push the mythology further this time. Icarus enters the story. The fall becomes more physical, more violent, more deliberate. The speaker isn’t simply descending from something that once felt like heaven; they are plummeting from it.
And then there is the ending.
In 2024, I wrote about newfound wings.
In 2026, I wrote about broken wings.
That change matters to me.
Because strength doesn’t always mean becoming untouched by what happened. Sometimes you keep the scars. Sometimes you keep the broken pieces. Sometimes you discover that you can still fly without first repairing everything that hurt you.
The angel doesn’t become an angel again.
They don’t return to the heaven they lost.
They don’t need the person who made them feel divine to give them their identity back.
They become something else.
A fallen angel who embraces the fallen.
The broken.
The free.
That is what this remix ultimately became: not a poem about getting back what was lost, but about discovering that losing it didn’t mean losing yourself.
I didn’t rewrite the 2024 version because it was wrong.
I rewrote it because I’ve had two more years to understand the fall.
And sometimes the person who wrote the first poem deserves to hear what the person you became has learned since then.
— Rowan Evans
I don’t need unbroken wings to fly. I just need to remember that they were mine before anyone promised me heaven.
Fallen Angel’s Reckoning (Remix) Poetry by Rowan Evans [written July 23th, 2026]
I remember when you said forever,
but forever never came,
so I fell like Lucifer,
from the heavens down I tumbled.
Returned your love,
played your game—
once an angel in your eyes,
now in darkness I crumbled.
Your promises were wings that lifted me high,
but they melted away, when I reached the sun—
just like Icarus, the light was my undoing.
It wasn’t just a fall, I was plummeting…
a fallen star,
cast from the sky,
now I walk in shadows,
where our love met its end.
Like Lucifer—I embraced the night,
wandering through realms of regret and pain,
I shed my halo,
lost my light,
no longer an angel,
in your eyes or in my name.
Yet in this darkness,
a new path unfurls—
I find strength in the ashes of our broken vow,
rising from the ruins of our shattered world.
I reclaim my soul,
I’m reborn here and now.
No longer bound by your empty decree—
I soar with broken wings,
embracing the fallen,
the broken, the free,
a fallen angel finding strength
I never knew I’d own.
Journey into the Hexverse…
[Homecoming] Homecoming is a return to the Gothic aesthetic at the heart of Rowan Evans’s poetry, blending Poe, mythology, horror icons, moonlight, ravens, and darkness into a meditation on artistic identity and finding your way back to the voice that feels like home.
[The Monster in the Margins] Drawing inspiration from horror icons like Michael Myers, Ghostface, Freddy Krueger, and Pennywise, this poem explores the darker side of creativity—where inspiration becomes an unstoppable force lurking just beyond the edge of the page.
[The Monster in the Margins II] The Monster in the Margins II transforms Rowan Evans’s Seven Deadly Sins mythology into a horror story written between the lines, where Lust, Wrath, Sloth, Greed, Pride, Envy, and Gluttony become monsters growing from pain, grudges, and scars.
[The Unkindness Descends] “The Unkindness Descends” is a Gothic symbolic poem exploring collapse, transformation, and the unsettling experience of being witnessed during moments of unraveling. Through raven imagery, ambiguity, and ritualistic atmosphere, the poem invites multiple interpretations—spiritual, psychological, ominous, or transformative.
[Gospel in Crimson] When writing becomes ritual and love becomes devotion, the line between creation and worship begins to blur. Gospel in Crimson explores obsession, artistry, and the sacred act of expression.
Poetry by Rowan Evans 