The title does something sly before the poem begins. "Inebriate" can be a noun, a habitual drunkard, or a verb, to make drunk, and Dave Bonta's six lines seem to work in both senses. They describe a drinker, and they also describe the process by which a self gets drowned. It looks like a drinking poem, but it is really about what drinking does to pain, and the answer is unsettling. It doesn't cure it. It only adds more.
The opening, "Pain with pain, / water into water," sets out that logic. Pour water into water and you can no longer tell where one ends and the other begins. The speaker hopes the wine will dissolve the hurt, but like meets like, and nothing changes except the volume. The colon after "water" turns the two lines into a bleak equation, and everything after it reads as the consequence. The phrase "water into water" is also hard to hear without thinking of the story of water turned into wine. Here the miracle is cancelled, because nothing is transformed. I read this as an echo rather than a certainty, but putting wine and water side by side invites it.
Then comes the pivot: "I have so much wine / I water myself." The line break lets "I have so much wine" stand for a moment as a boast about abundance before the consequence arrives. "Water" is now a verb, and it carries several meanings at once. It can mean diluting, as a bartender thins a drink. It can mean irrigating, as a gardener tends a plant. The poem never says the speaker weeps, but tears are not far away either. The self is both the thing thinned out and the thing looked after, so care and erasure happen in the same gesture. The sounds support this. "Water," "wine," "water" repeat that soft w, and by the time "myself" arrives, even the speaker has been pulled into the poem's liquid vocabulary.
The last two lines change the register sharply. "Hew" is a hard, physical verb, the word for cutting stone or timber, and after all that liquid it is like hearing a chisel. "Hew me a lodging" also has an old-fashioned ring, with its reflexive "me," as if this were ancient labour rather than a modern bad night. A "lodging" is not a home but a temporary room, a place to stay, and the poem ends in "a dark bed." The text does not choose between sleep, stupor and something more final like a grave. There is also a quieter reading that the water imagery invites: a bed is where a river runs, and water is what carves it. Read that way, the speaker is a stream digging its own channel, both the labourer and the thing that settles into the hollow.
The form reinforces all of this. There is no end rhyme and no regular metre, so the poem offers no tidy click of closure. Instead it works through weight. It opens and closes on heavy monosyllables, "Pain with pain" and "dark bed," where the stresses fall almost equally and land like thuds. Between them the lines loosen and flow, and "water into water" has a rolling, trochaic movement. Punctuation does the same work. After the comma and the colon in the first two lines, the rest runs as one unbroken sentence with no pause until the final full stop. The syntax slides downhill, just as the speaker does.
The poem is significant for how much it leaves out. The speaker never says what hurts, and the word "pain" is the only named emotion in six lines. Everything else is carried by image and sound, so the reader feels the drift rather than being told about it. It neither glamorizes drinking nor lectures against it. It also contains a quiet paradox: the more wine there is ("so much"), the smaller the world becomes, shrinking from abundance to a single hewn lodging in the dark. The poem leaves that shrinking unexplained, and its power comes from that restraint.