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Poetry by Rowan Evans

Tag: poetry about poetry

  • The Metaphor Machine | A Meta Poetry Experiment by Rowan Evans

    Rowan Evans

    Author’s Note

    The Metaphor Machine is a poem about the machinery behind my own poetry. I wanted to pull back the curtain and show what happens when a single line starts generating connections: moonlight becomes tide, tide becomes ocean, ocean becomes shoreline, shoreline becomes city streets, and suddenly the poem has wandered somewhere entirely different.

    The joke is that I’m explaining the process while actively doing it. The poem breaks its own lines, interrupts its own thoughts, calls attention to its metaphors, and then circles back to reveal that all those seemingly wandering pieces were connected by the same machine.

    Sometimes I don’t choose the metaphor. I just follow where it takes me.

    — Rowan Evans

    An open notebook whose poetic imagery transforms from moonlight and ocean waves into a shoreline and city streets.
    One metaphor becomes another, and the machine keeps running.

    The Metaphor Machine
    Poetry by Rowan Evans

    I’ll write a line in a way
    that’ll make you pause—
    then I’ll take that line
    and break that line,
    to break the thought—

    then I sprinkle in the metaphors,
    and this is really what I get meta for—

    I talk about the moon
    and the silver light,
    the way it shimmers—
    its image trembles
    across the top
    of dark water—
    that’s one I’ve said before.
    And I’ve said it lot,
    but I’m not going to stop.

    This is where the tides comes,
    and there the tide goes—
    because that’s how the tide works.

    And the ocean—

    this is a poem, I wrote…
    you didn’t think
    we were going to skip this one,
    did you?

    And the ocean,
    it’s so polite—
    the way it waves,
    every time it sees my face.
    It’s a familiar place,
    I sit on the shoreline, often—
    not in reality, but in my mind—
    that’s where the thoughts soften.

    Now, for the city streets—
    the heat, and god—
    that humidity, the way it clings.
    You’d think I’d dream of…
    somewhere less…
    humid? But I digress,
    it’s always love that I express
    for the islands I haven’t touched yet.

    If you’re following along—

    I wrote a line
    that made you pause—
    then I took that line
    and I broke that line—

    and that broke the thought.

    Then that’s where the pivot came,
    I told you what I really went meta for.

    It’s the metaphors.

    Moon to tide,
    tied to the ocean—
    a shoreline or two,
    next to the ocean blue—
    then beaches to city streets,
    it’s the same ones I walk in sleep.

    Journey into the Hexverse

    [Welcome to the Hexverse]
    Step into the Hexverse—a poetic world where mythmaking, humor, rage, creativity, and confession collide, and darkness becomes something that can be reshaped into art.

    [High Tide]
    A short reflective poem about leaving, returning, and accepting the forces that pull us back—like the tide guided by the moon.

    [Let Me Pacific]
    A lyrical poem about sitting beside the Pacific Ocean and discovering that an enormous body of water can become a bridge between distant hearts. Through ocean imagery, wordplay, and reflections on California and the Philippines, Let Me Be Pacific explores how love and poetry can cross even the greatest distances.

    [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]

  • Escaped to the Page | A Confessional Poem About Writing & Identity

    Rowan Evans

    Author’s Note

    This piece was written while listening to “Role Model” by Eminem, and you can probably feel that influence in the posture of it.

    There’s swagger here. Sharpness. A little confrontation.

    But beneath that, this piece is really about the difference between shared labels and shared experience.

    Two people can both call themselves poets and still arrive at the page from completely different places emotionally, stylistically, philosophically, and spiritually. The label itself doesn’t erase individuality. If anything, art becomes meaningful because of the differences in how we carry our histories into it.

    That’s what this poem is wrestling with.

    Not superiority. Specificity.

    The truth is, I’ve spent more than two decades building my relationship with language. Not just learning how to write, but learning how to survive through writing. A lot of the imagery in this piece—cathedrals, altars, confession, Gothic romanticism—comes from the emotional architecture I’ve spent years constructing around my work.

    Those images aren’t aesthetic decoration for me. They’re autobiographical.

    When I say my environment “felt more like a cage,” I mean that literally in the emotional sense. Writing became escape, translation, preservation, and eventually identity. The page became the place where I could expand beyond the limits of the environments I grew up inside.

    So while the voice in this poem is intentionally bold, the core of it is actually vulnerable:
    the fear of becoming interchangeable, the need to protect individuality, and the understanding that art is shaped as much by lived experience as talent itself.

    Because someone can imitate style. They can imitate rhythm. They can imitate aesthetic.

    But nobody else has lived your exact life.

    And eventually, that truth always bleeds through the writing.

    — Rowan Evans

    A poet writing alone in a dark cathedral-like room filled with books, candles, and scattered pages.
    Some people write because they want to. Some write because the page became the only place they could fully exist.

    Escaped to the Page
    Poetry by Rowan Evans

    You could be just like me,
    you could write like me—
    be full of empathy like me,
    definition of compassion just like me.

    You could be just like me—
    but still you’d never be me.

    You could build worlds
    with words, just like me—
    cathedrals and altars,
    reverence and devotion, just like me—

    You could imitate the shape—
    but you’d never be the source.
    Don’t even try, just stop.

    You think we’re the same
    because the labels we wear?
    I’m a poet, you’re a poet too—
    but that doesn’t make us a matching pair.

    Twenty-three years,
    I’ve been doing this—
    metaphors like weapons,
    meta-poetry, meta-lessons—
    look at everything I’ve written.

    Confessions penned
    in Gothic lace,
    Romanticized darkness
    because that’s the only place
    I feel at home.

    My environment
    felt more like a cage,
    so I escaped to the page.
    I wrote lines of longing,
    looking for belonging—

    because I’ve been knowing,
    this isn’t the place I’d finish growing.

    Journey into the Hexverse…

    [Ink as a Second Mouth]
    “Ink as a Second Mouth” explores the distance between thought and speech, and the ways writing can become a form of survival, continuity, and self-translation. Through confessional imagery and reflections on growth, identity, and articulation, the poem examines what it means to keep becoming through language.

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