Five lines, two sentences, one cup of ale: Dave Bonta's "Social drinker" fits a whole comic self-portrait into less space than most people need to order a round. The joke starts with the title. "Social drinker" is the phrase people use to make their habits sound respectable, a small badge of moderation. Yet the only company the speaker names is a monkey and a hound. The sociability has been moved out of the human world, and the poem never says whether these companions are real pets, imaginary ones, or parts of the speaker himself.
The monkey is the slipperier of the two. The word carries baggage, from "monkey business" to the "monkey on your back," so it hints at both mischief and compulsion. "My monkey and I / make trouble" sounds like a partnership of equals, a comic double act, and the tidy grammar of "my monkey and I" gives the pair a mock-formal dignity. It is tempting to read the monkey as the speaker's impulsive side, the part that grabs and mimics and gets into things, though the poem only suggests this. What matters is where the trouble happens: "in a cup of ale." Not in the tavern or the street, but inside the cup, as if the whole mess were brewing there. The preposition shrinks the scale, giving us grand mischief on a very small stage. "Ale," rather than "beer," also adds an old-fashioned note of inns and storytelling, which quietly prepares for the last line.
The poem's sound is as loose as its subject. There is no rhyme, and nothing chimes neatly at line-ends. But look at "monkey," "trouble," "cup" and "drunk." They share the same blunt, muddy vowel, so the language thickens and slurs just as the speaker presumably does. Later, "talk," "to" and "tone" tap out a run of t-sounds that gives the final lines a precise, deliberate edge, as if the speaker is concentrating on sounding wise.
The line lengths work in a similar way. Counting syllables, the lines run five, three, five, six, seven. The shortest line, "make trouble," sits alone, so the two words land like a hiccup or a wink. After that the lines grow steadily longer, and the second sentence opens with a single word, "Drunk," followed by a comma. The euphemism of the title is dropped and the confession arrives flatly. The longer lines that follow suggest a speaker warming up, getting expansive, and settling in to deliver a speech.
That speech goes to the hound, who is the monkey's opposite: loyal, patient, domestic, a listener who stays put. The speaker addresses him "in the tone of an Aesop," and here the poem turns on a reversal. Aesop's fables are famous for animals who talk and for the neat morals that close them. In Bonta's version the animal is silent, the human does all the talking, and the moral voice belongs to the person least qualified to use it. Turning the name into a common noun, "an Aesop," makes it a type of voice, a pompous sage, and adds to the comedy. The poem also ends on that name, like a fable that has arrived at its last line and left out the lesson. We have to supply the moral ourselves, perhaps that drink makes everyone feel wise, or that anyone can sound profound to a dog.
The phrase "in the tone of" gives the speaker away, though. To describe your own manner you have to hear it from the outside, so a sober observer is still sitting inside the drunk. The poem is amused by its speaker without being cruel to him, and he seems to share the joke.
That balance is what makes this small poem worth reading. In a handful of plain words it manages self-mockery, a sly comment on how we talk about our own habits, and a playful turn on one of the oldest forms of animal storytelling. By the end the speaker has joined his own menagerie: a monkey, a hound, and a man performing wisdom for an audience that cannot answer back.