Nine short lines, no title, no capital letters, and no explanation of who is speaking or where. The three asterisks that stand in for a title suggest we have walked into the middle of something. What follows is a mind coming loose from its moorings. Judging by the imagery, it is a mind shaken by drink, or at least imitating the shakiness of withdrawal. The central idea seems to be that reason is a thin layer over a trembling body, and that when the layer slips, what is left is a drift of sensations, farewells and geography.
The opening line sets the physical tone: "trembling like a truck." The simile is odd and precise. A truck is heavy, and it shudders most when it idles or when it passes and shakes the ground. The poem gives no subject for the verb, so the trembling seems to belong to everything at once. The sound reinforces it. "Trembling," "truck," "tiny" and "tremens" all hammer on the same tr- and t- consonants, so the line vibrates as you say it. The phrase "tiny lapses" sits against the huge truck. A lapse can be a gap in memory, in attention, or in sobriety, and the poem lets all three meanings hover. Then comes the blunt clinical term, "delirium tremens," the shaking and hallucination of severe alcohol withdrawal. Even that is delivered flatly, as a fragment ending in a full stop, without alarm.
The next image moves from the body to the mind: "logic describes / lazy circles in the sky." "Describes" works as a geometry word, since you describe a circle, and the circle is also the shape of circular reasoning. Logic becomes a bird of prey, or a plane waiting for permission to land, going round without arriving anywhere. The word "lazy" is the quiet joke. Logic is usually meant to be strict and purposeful, and here it hangs overhead like a bored scavenger.
Then the voice switches languages: "adios mes amigos." The line is a small collision. "Adios" and "amigos" are Spanish, but "mes" is the French for "my," where Spanish would say "mis." Whether that is a slip or a deliberate blend, it fits a speaker whose grip on grammar is loosening. It is also a goodbye with no stated reason, tossed off in a cheerful borrowed accent. After the dread of the opening, the tone turns breezy, even theatrical.
The poem's most jarring moment follows: "fucking amid the maps, / views of rivers, / and so forth." It is the only coarse word in the poem, and it lands without a lead-in. The reader has to decide who or what is doing the fucking, and the poem does not say. The participle echoes "trembling" from the first line, so the poem begins and nearly ends on a bodily verb with no clear subject. What surrounds that act is almost comically abstract: maps, views, rivers, all of them representations of the world rather than the world itself. The body and its appetites are set down in the middle of the paperwork of knowing. Then "and so forth" closes the poem with a shrug. It promises a list and delivers none, which is also how the poem refuses to wrap up what it has been saying.
Structurally, the poem has no regular meter and no end rhyme. Its lines are short, between three and six syllables or so, and nearly every one is a self-contained fragment closed with a comma or a full stop. That punctuation makes the poem move in jerks, as if thought keeps starting and stalling. There are small sound echoes, such as "lapses" and "maps," or the open vowels of "adios" and "amigos," but they never settle into a pattern.
The poem is worth reading because it enacts its subject instead of describing it. Its disjointed syntax and sudden shifts of language and register create the experience of a mind misfiring, and it manages this in barely a dozen lines. It also asks a sharp question about what we trust. If logic only circles lazily and the maps are just views, what is left to hold on to? The poem's answer is unsettling, because it offers only the body, still trembling.