Sixteen syllables, four lines, and a whole habit of living folded inside them. Dave Bonta's "Old drunk" begins with a fragment so bare that it can be read several ways at once: "Lit again." In slang, "lit" means drunk. It is also what a lamp, a window or a cigarette is once it has been switched on or struck. With no subject and no verb, the speaker is reduced to a condition, like a streetlight coming on at dusk. "Again" turns the evening into a routine, a ritual that has happened many times before. The title adds an outsider's verdict. "Old drunk" is how a stranger would label this man, flat and unforgiving, and the poem seems to begin by accepting that label.
Then the grammar shifts from fact to wish: "If my absence were / with her / I could carry my age." The subjunctive "were" is the language of things that are not so. The central image is a strange one. Absence is normally a lack, yet here it can be "with" someone, as if it were an object he could leave in her keeping. The poem supports at least two readings. In one, the speaker imagines his own removal, his drinking and his presence no longer weighing on her, as a kind of gift. In the other, absence is already what she receives from him in his blank, drunken hours, and he wishes it were something gentler for her to hold. The poem never says who "her" is, and it is wiser to admit that than to guess. Her namelessness keeps the focus on his guilt rather than on a story.
The final line carries the poem's most interesting word. "Carry" echoes familiar expressions: a man who "can carry his liquor," a person who "carries their years well." Both ideas meet in "I could carry my age." Drink and old age are fused into one burden, and the speaker admits he cannot manage it as things stand. The paradox is that the condition for bearing himself is his own absence from her. Against the opening word "lit," with its suggestion of light and presence, the poem sets "absence," and the two sit like a bulb and the dark it leaves behind.
The construction is as unsteady as its speaker. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines run three, five, two and six syllables, a pattern that lurches rather than marches. The break after "were" leaves the verb dangling at the end of the line, and the sentence seems to hesitate as if looking for its footing. The shortest stretch, "with her," holds the only reference to another person. She is given the least room on the page, yet the whole thought turns on her. A few sounds link the lines quietly. "Were" and "her" chime inside the second and third lines. The hard c of "could carry" gives the last line a heavy, lifting effort. And "again" and "age" faintly echo each other at the poem's two ends, as though age were simply the sum of all the agains.
One more shift is easy to miss. The title speaks of the man in the third person, the way the world sees him, while the poem itself speaks only as "I" and "my." The public label comes first, and then the private voice answers it, not by denying it but by saying what it costs.
What makes the poem significant is how little it needs. It does not plead, blame or describe a bottle. It gets its pathos from small words doing heavy work: "lit," "were," "with," "carry." The sentence about absence never resolves. The "if" hangs open at the end, and so does the speaker's situation. Like the compressed forms of haiku, the poem trusts the reader to fill the silence, and what we supply there, whether tenderness, shame or resignation, is its real subject.