Author’s Note

Some poems begin with an idea. Others begin with a feeling that refuses to leave.

This one was written in the early hours of the morning, during that familiar stretch of time when the world grows quiet enough for my thoughts to become louder than everything else.

I’ve always found it easier to write than to speak. Conversations ask for immediate answers. Poetry allows me to sit with a feeling until I understand it well enough to translate it into language.

Many of the recurring images throughout my recent work—the moon, the tide, distant shores, dreams, and city streets—have become a personal symbolic language. They aren’t separate subjects anymore. They all point toward the same emotional center.

This poem finally acknowledges that.

Sometimes the metaphors aren’t hiding anything.

Sometimes they’re quietly leading us back to the truth we were trying not to say.

— Rowan Evans

Where the Metaphors Lead
Poetry by Rowan Evans

It’s funny how I find myself here again,
four AM—it’s just me, the music and my pen.
I’ve got so many thoughts with so much to say,
my lips move but no sound comes—
like I lost one voice, when I found the other.

And it’s not that I can’t speak—

it’s just that words don’t come easily,
when they try to come verbally.

But on the page,
everything lines up—

the thoughts, the feelings,
the things I never say out loud.
Ink doesn’t trip over itself
the way my voice does.

So here are a few
truths for you—

there is a woman
she is on my mind constantly,
yeah, she is simultaneously
the easiest and hardest to talk to.

She makes me feel like I can be me—
completely.

And honestly,
I’ve never really had that
with anybody else—

every beautiful line I write
about the moon in the sky,
the ocean and tide—

yeah, most of the time
it leads back to her
in my mind.

And every dream, I translate in ink—
the shores I walk in sleep,
secrets I try not to keep,
even when it’s hard to speak—

I lay them on the page and pray
that they’ll reach their destination one day.

So I sit here,
four AM again,
writing the things
I can’t say out loud—

hoping one day
I’ll find the courage
to speak them aloud.

Journey into the Hexverse…

[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.

[Every Night, The Same Flight]
Every night begins with the same flight. Between wakefulness and sleep, an airport appears, a familiar shoreline waits beyond the journey, and the same dream asks whether some destinations find us before we’re ready to find them.

[Where I Belonged]
A bedroom becomes an airport in the space between sleep and waking. Where I Belonged explores liminal consciousness, uncertainty, and the strange moments when reality feels suspended between two worlds

[Opposites Coasts of the Same Silence]
What separates two people isn’t always an ocean. Sometimes it’s the silence between everything left unsaid. Opposite Coasts of the Same Silence explores longing, distance, dreams, and the quiet hope that even across impossible divides, someone might still hear your voice.

[Ocean Waves (1, 4, 3)]
A moonlit shoreline, a rowboat full of ducks, a piggybank with no cents, and a confession hidden in plain sight. Ocean Waves (1, 4, 3) explores how humor, wordplay, and absurdity can become a side door to vulnerability when the truth feels too difficult to say directly.

[Call of the Tide]
A poem about identity, displacement, and the quiet pull toward something beyond the shoreline you were born on. Sometimes the tide calls louder than the anthem.

If you’re interested in more poetry, you can find it here → [The Library of Ashes]