29 March 2026

By Philip Kuepper

To crew my boat
I would not
crew it with poets.
Were I to, my boat
would sail like a smashed atom
flying off, wildly,
in every direction at once,
each poet’s psyche
steering its own
passionate course,
each sailed by its own
divine inspiring.
What a conflagration
of fires within
to sail across a body of water!
No.
I crew my boat alone.
Otherwise, my voyage
would know only doom,
the doom of turning in circles,
ever tighter, ever smaller,
until all passage
would only come to be tied
in a knot of going nowhere.

(18 March 2026)