Drunkenness, in this poem, starts as a problem of definition. "Drunkenness or doing what you're not supposed to / or not doing what you're supposed to": the repeated "or" stacks up alternatives until being drunk spills into something much wider, a general failure to behave as one should. The wrongdoing runs in both directions, sins of doing and sins of not doing. Alcohol is never named. What the speaker describes is guilt, the gap between what you ought to be and what you turned out to be. The second-person "you" gives the opening the tone of a rule everyone has absorbed, and also of a scolding the speaker aims at themselves.
Then the poem drops into the body. "Short of breath and sweaty. / Dense." The sentences shrink to fragments, and "Dense" sits alone, meaning heavy, slow and thick-headed all at once. The central image follows: "A brain like glass nothing sticks / a mind's eye like glass." With no punctuation after the first "glass", the sentence slides straight into "nothing sticks", which is exactly what the sentence describes: thoughts can't get a grip on a smooth surface. Glass is also transparent and breakable, so the mind's eye is a lens that can't focus, and a mind that could shatter. Since no drink is mentioned, it is tempting to hear a drinking glass hiding in the word, though that is my inference from the text. Repeating the simile makes the passage loop, the way a foggy mind circles the same thought.
The first "I" arrives only in the middle, and it arrives confessing ignorance: "what I can't figure / the faint breath there / something passing or just passed." The syntax hangs open, and we never learn what the speaker can't figure out. The "faint breath" echoes the earlier "short of breath", so breath becomes a thin sign of life, or perhaps a presence. "Passing or just passed" repeats the poem's "or" structure, now applied to time. The speaker can't tell whether the thing is still happening or already over, which is a very drunk way of experiencing a night. It could be a memory, a person, a feeling or the night itself, and the poem refuses to choose.
The morning arrives in plain, almost domestic language: "In the morning no cigarette smoke inhaled / over toothpaste." The detail is small and specific, a smoker's bathroom routine, and what matters is the absence. The word "no" quietly echoes the earlier "not", so the poem is still defined by what fails to happen. The poem doesn't say whether the missing cigarette is resolve or just queasiness, and that ambiguity feels honest.
The last line is the most striking: "What full head What empty stomach What spotted hands." The repeated "What" gives an exclamation, but there are no exclamation marks and no full stops. Only the capital letters separate the items, so it reads like a muttered tally under the breath. The line is built on a paradox, since a head can be full of pressure and noise while the stomach is empty. "Spotted hands" is the most unsettling image. Judging by it, the speaker is looking at hands that show age and wear, perhaps held under the tap, and the hangover turns into a brief glimpse of mortality.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines swing from the long, almost legal first sentence to jerky fragments and back out to the final triple cry. That irregularity suits the subject, because the poem's grammar slips and loses its punctuation just as the speaker's grip on the night does. The title's numeral suggests a return to the subject, as if one attempt hadn't exhausted it.
The poem matters because it avoids both glamour and sermon. The opening names rules but never enforces them, and the poem ends on an inventory of the body's evidence rather than a lesson. Shame here is not argued but felt, through glass, breath, toothpaste and spotted hands.