Six short lines, one sentence, and a speaker who has clearly had a lovely afternoon. Dave Bonta's "Drunk-think" is small enough to take in at a glance, yet it keeps opening up the longer you look. The subject is simple: a man drinks on a nice day and starts to wonder about his own head. The central idea is sneakier. The poem suggests that the grand human hunt for "meaning" might start, and maybe finish, with the plain fact of having a body full of openings.
The title coins a compound that sounds like a diagnosis, as if drunkenness had its own way of reasoning. The poem then performs that reasoning instead of describing it. "The day being very pleasant" is a formal, slightly old-fashioned opening, the kind of phrase a gentleman might use to excuse himself in a diary. The weather becomes an alibi. Then "very pleasant" comes back in the second line, and it has quietly changed jobs. First it described the day; now it seems to describe the drinking, or the drunk, or the speaker himself. The grammar never says which. The pleasantness simply leaks from the weather into the man, as it does on a warm afternoon with a glass in hand.
"I drank like a drunk" is a comic simile because it compares something to itself. He doesn't say he got drunk. He drank in the manner of one, as though it were a style he had adopted for the occasion. There is no guilt here, no hangover, no moral. The tone is amused and faintly pleased with itself.
Then comes the pivot into thought, and the syntax goes loose. "Puzzled about finding out" stacks two verbs where one would do. You puzzle over something; you don't usually puzzle about finding out. The sentence wanders the way a walk does after a few drinks. The sounds loosen too. "Being," "finding" and "meaning" form a chain of -ing endings that slur gently into one another, and "puzzled" echoes "pleasant" in the line above.
The final image is the poem's best. "The holes" are never listed, so the reader counts them: eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth. The speaker contemplates his own face as if from inside it. Judging by the imagery, "holes" may also hint at gaps in memory or logic, which is exactly what drinking produces. Then one hole gets singled out: the "merry spigot." A spigot is a tap, normally fitted to a cask, so the head turns into a barrel and the mouth into the place where the contents go in. "Merry" is a transferred epithet. The speaker is the merry one, but the adjective lands on the tap. In English, "merry" is also an old word for pleasantly tipsy, so the word does double duty. A spigot also pours, so the image quietly allows for talk, laughter and spilled thoughts coming out as well.
The poem has no end rhyme, but the repeated "very pleasant" works like a rhyme that is too identical to count, the same sounds returning like a hiccup. Near the end a hum of m-sounds gathers: "meaning," "merry," "my." The lines also taper. Counting syllables, they run roughly eight, nine, eight, then six, five, three. The poem drains down like a cask being emptied, or like a wandering thought narrowing to a point. The last three words, "in my head," are all short and heavy, and they land like a glass set down on a table. The opening lines bounce along in a near sing-song, and the ending brings that bounce to a stop.
The poem is worth reading because it shrinks an old subject, the link between wine and wisdom, into something small and funny. A grand philosophical question ("the meaning of...") is asked by a drunk and answered, or at least redirected, by anatomy. The joke has an edge, though. The instrument doing the puzzling is the very thing under investigation, and it has been tampered with. The speaker can't get outside his head to examine it. He can only sit in the sun, pleasantly, and wonder at the openings through which the whole world, drink included, comes in.