Author’s Note

There are poems that ask you to listen.

There are poems that ask you to feel.

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

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.

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