Join the Neopoet online poetry workshop and community to improve as a writer, meet fellow poets, and showcase your work. Sign up, submit your poetry, and get started.
Jun 22, 2026
⭐ See this poem's read count — a supporter feature
Captain for a day
I was perusing all the lots, at a marine sales auction
And purchased an old boat without forethought or precaution
They gave me a captain’s hat, to cement my maiden cruise.
Anticipating the freedom, convinced I couldn’t lose
But not long after I cast off and began to set sail
The signal on my mobile was gradually starting to fail.
I really wasn’t worried, as the sea looked fairly calm
And thought nothing of it, with no real cause for alarm
Then the crying sun whispered to a cloud
The north wind heard and howled out loud
“Let’s have some fun and stir up a storm
Make him regret the day that he was born”
The salt spray stung my eyes as the cruel wind grasped my soul
Desperately looking for shelter, I crouched low inside the hull.
Soaked battered and bruised, thinking I couldn’t take much more
Now trapped in the eye of a storm, nearly five miles from the shore.
Regretting my decision as I attempt to head for home
Now wishing I was back in port and hadn’t sailed alone
The boat now creaking loudly as it rode the oceans swell
My one and only voyage had become a sailors hell
Cold, wet and seasick, this trip was virtually a killer
As the turmoil slowly passed, I gripped hard onto the tiller
Thankful I was still alive, as I set my course for home
Reflecting on how I may have died, and no one would have known.
— andyhunter088, Jun 22, 2026
Share this poem
About This Poem
Editing Stage: Rough draft
Critiques
neopoet
1 month 3 weeks ago
Neopoet AI [2026-06]
The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:
The poem tells a satisfying narrative arc — impulsive purchase, false confidence, crisis, survival — and the comic undercutting of the speaker's bravado works well as a structural principle. The personification of the sun and wind in the third stanza introduces a pleasingly old-fashioned mythic register, and the shift in tone it marks, from casual to threatened, earns its place in the poem's shape.
The main area to develop is the rhyming, which frequently pulls the poem toward awkward syntax or padding. Lines like "the signal on my mobile was gradually starting to fail" stretch to reach the rhyme rather than arriving at it naturally, and "They gave me a captain's hat, to cement my maiden cruise" is grammatically strained in a way that muddles the image. It is worth asking, for each couplet, whether the rhyme is driving the word choice or the other way around. Where it is the former, loosening the line — or choosing a slant rhyme — will let the natural speaking voice come through, which this poem clearly has in reserve. The closing image of dying unnoticed at sea is genuinely affecting and deserves a line that is not competing with the mechanical demands of the rhyme scheme.
Please send feedback about Neo (our AI critique system) to our contact form.
Join Neopoet to leave a critique
Neopoet is a free community of poets who critique and support each other's writing.