Self-Centered Captain

W. Barrett Munn

Confusion
doesn't move me
emotionally or
intellectually. Poems
aren't puzzles.
Where's the story
inside a maelstrom?
The foolish ship,
if trapped,
has a sap for a captain,
too hungover to notice
the warning signs;
he now sighs and thinks
about Juanita
who refilled his cup
last night time after time
until liquor's warning signs
were ignored, and
too drunk to care
or read, he was a captain
on a mission
of self-destruction,
and now this, how remiss
of him not to order them
to abandon ship; he
should have known
he couldn't
go down with the ship
alone.

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W. Barrett Munn
Winston Munn’s poems, writing as W. Barrett Munn, have appeared in print and online in Awakenings Review, The New Verse News, Sequoia Speaks, Soul Poetry, Prose, & Arts Magazine, Book of Matches, Copperfield Review Quarterly, Haikuniverse, 5-7-5 Haiku Journal, and many others.