A headache is nothing to brag about, yet William Corbett opens with something like a hotel brochure: "a richly appointed headache." The phrase borrows the language of estate agents and boutique suites, where "richly appointed" promises velvet and polished wood. Applied to pain, it turns the speaker's misery into a joke at his own expense. Together with the title's "Drunkenness," the line suggests a hangover, though the poem never names one. The headache is furnished, roomy and inescapable, and the speaker is stuck in it like an overnight guest who can't check out.
The rest of the poem takes place in a dream, and it is built to feel like one. The sentences have no punctuation. "The gun shoots water / I escape by swinging" runs two separate events together with no comma, no "and," no "so," and the reader has to accept the logic as a dreamer would. The first surprise is the gun. A gun is supposed to be the most serious object in a chase scene, but this one fires water, so the threat is deflated at once. Judging by the imagery, the speaker's dehydrated, aching body may have leaked into the dream, since water is what a hungover person craves. The poem doesn't insist on that reading, and it works equally well as plain absurdity.
The escape is just as comic. He swings "from a low branch," which sounds like a boy's game, or an action film shrunk to playground size. The word "low" undercuts any heroism. No vine, no cliff, nothing dramatic is at stake, only a branch near the ground. Yet the stanza break lands exactly as he is airborne: "from a low branch" ends one stanza and "onto a moving truck" begins the next. The reader hangs in the white space between them, so the form acts out the swing. The truck is moving, too, so the speaker never reaches solid ground. He goes from one unstable thing to another.
The poem has no rhyme and no fixed meter, and it sounds like someone telling a friend a dream over coffee. Still, the first line has a faint, mock-stately beat, with stresses falling on "IS," "RICH," "POINT," and "HEAD." That pomp makes the plain, short "and in my dream" that follows feel like a slump. The sounds are worth noticing as well. The consonants in "branch," "truck," and "caught" are hard and clipped, while "shoots water" is soft and hissing. The dream is partly a clash between the harmless weapon and the jolting, physical escape.
The last line carries the most weight: "before I am caught empty handed." The expected idiom is "caught red-handed," meaning caught in the act of a crime. "Empty handed" means having nothing to show for your effort. By blending the two, Corbett gives the speaker a feeling of guilt with no crime attached. He is being pursued, he doesn't know why, and he has nothing to hand over. That is a very recognizable hangover mood, a vague sense that last night's actions are about to catch up with him, with no clear memory of what they were. "Before" also leaves the poem unresolved. The capture never happens, so the speaker ends mid-flight, still on the truck and still anxious.
The title adds its own contrast. "Drunkenness 7" has the numbering of an entry in a series, which suggests, though the poem alone can't confirm it, that this is one of several pieces on the same subject. Then comes the blunt "Weird Shit," which is the reader's reaction and the speaker's, cut down to two words. The grand "richly appointed" and the offhand "Weird Shit" sit at opposite ends of the register, and the poem lives in the space between them.
What makes it worth reading is its honesty about small, unglamorous experience. Drunkenness in poems is often romantic or tragic, but here it is embarrassing, slightly silly, and faintly guilty. In seven short lines Corbett shows how the mind turns bodily discomfort into slapstick and then lets worry creep back in at the end. He doesn't explain the dream or draw a moral. He leaves the reader, like the speaker, with empty hands.