Six short lines are enough for Dave Bonta to sketch a whole downward slope. A man arrives in town with a plan, finds the plan losing its shine, and ends by admitting, quietly and almost under his breath, that he is no longer the one in charge. The title, "Drunkard's progress", sets up the irony. A story of "progress" promises forward movement, and what we get is a slide, measured not in miles but in shrinking pleasure.
The poem is built from three couplets, and each is a stage. The first gives arrival and intention: "I came to town / to blot out the hours." The second gives disappointment: "though it did not seem so good / as at first." The third reveals dependence. Nothing is dressed up. There is no rhyme and no punctuation at all, not even a full stop, and the lines are short and mostly made of one-syllable words, with two or three beats each. Without punctuation the poem never stops to take a breath. It drifts from clause to clause the way a long evening does. Because the stanzas begin in lowercase ("though", "the bottle"), each seems to continue the last rather than start afresh, as if the speaker could not find a clean place to stop.
The key phrase is "blot out". A blot is an ink word: it spoils a page, and to blot something out is to cover it so it can no longer be read. The speaker treats time as if it were text he could scratch over. What he wants erased is not a particular grief or memory but "the hours", which is plain and unspecific. The poem never says what he is running from, and the withholding makes him easier to recognise in anyone. There is also a small sound trick. "Blot" and "bottle" share the same consonants, b, l and t, so the object that will take over his life is already hiding inside the wish that sent him to town.
The second couplet turns on understatement. "Did not seem so good / as at first" is a very mild way to describe a failing remedy. The word "seem" keeps the speaker at a distance from his own experience, and the pronoun "it" is left unexplained. It could be the town, the drink, or the oblivion itself. That vagueness suits the point, since the pleasure has gone flat everywhere at once. There is no crash and no dramatic low, only diminishing returns, which is perhaps how a habit really tightens. The drinking goes on after the enjoyment has gone.
The last couplet delivers the poem's one image: "the bottle is a woman". It is a flat metaphor with no "like" or "as", and the indefinite "a woman" gives her no name or history, only a role. Casting addiction as a clinging lover is an old move, but the grammar here is sharper than the trope. The speaker does not say he hopes to put her down. He hopes she "may let me be". She is the one who decides and he waits for permission. The words "hope" and "may" are tentative, almost prayerful, and they show how far authority has shifted since the confident "I came to town". Judging by the phrasing, there is also a hint of self-deception, since it is convenient to make the bottle the one holding on.
The final words, "let me be", carry a double meaning. They can mean "leave me alone", but they also mean "allow me to exist". The poem ends on the bare verb of existence, the very thing he came to blot out. In the end he is asking not for pleasure or even for forgetting, only to be left to simply be.
That compression is what makes the poem worth reading. It does not preach or plead or perform its misery. It gives three small steps (a decision, a letdown, a quiet confession), and the reader has to supply the rest. It also leaves an uncomfortable question hanging in its last line: if he truly hopes she will release him, why is he still with her?