Six short lines, no capital letters, no punctuation, and still a whole social scene: a man ranting, a speaker half-drunk himself, and an evening by a bridge. Dave Bonta's "Drunks" says very little, and most of its force comes from what it lets the reader work out.
The first couplet gives the poem's sharpest insight. "The rattle of fear / in every one of his rants" suggests that the loud, aggressive talk of a drunk is not strength but its opposite. A rattle is a thin, hollow, nervous sound, and the word may bring to mind loose change, a snake's warning, or even a death rattle. The line "in every one of his rants" adds that this is a habit: whatever he rants about, the fear is the same. The speaker hears past the words to the sound underneath them, as if the content of the rant hardly matters. The hard, clipped consonants of "rattle" and "rants" make the line itself sound like what it describes.
The poem then swerves from "his" to "I." The title is plural, "Drunks," and the second couplet shows why: the speaker is one of them. "Foxed with wine / I make my own water" is both funny and slyly clever. "Foxed" is an unusual word for drunk. It suggests cunning, but it also describes the brown stains on old paper, so the speaker seems weathered, mottled, aged by drink. "Make my own water" is a plain, almost jaunty way of saying he is urinating, but it also reverses the miracle of water turned into wine. Here the wine goes back to water, and the body does the undoing. The word "own" matters too. The ranter needs an audience for his fear. The speaker, by contrast, has a small private act that belongs entirely to him, which gives him a faintly comic dignity.
The lack of punctuation lets the lines slide into one another. "In every one of his rants / foxed with wine" can be read straight across the stanza break, so that the ranter is the one who is foxed. A moment later the same words attach to "I." The poem never fixes the boundary between the man who rants and the man who listens, and that blur may be the point. The speaker's judgment of the other man does not set him apart, and the poem does not stop to moralize about it.
The last couplet widens the view with an easy, almost pastoral line: "in the cool of the evening." Its gentle vowels are a relief after the rattling consonants of the opening. The phrase may faintly echo the biblical "cool of the day" from the Garden of Eden, though that is an inference, and the poem does not insist on it. Either way, the calm of the hour sits oddly beside what is actually happening, and the contrast is part of the humor. Then the final line drops: "against the bridge." The preposition does double duty. He may be urinating against the bridge, or leaning on it to stay upright, and probably both. A bridge is a place of crossing, neither one bank nor the other, and that suits a speaker who is neither quite sober nor fully gone. The poem ends on this physical, unglamorous detail with no lesson attached.
The form supports this restraint. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only short lines of two or three strong beats, close to speech. The brevity and the focus on a small human foolishness recall the spirit of the senryu, though the poem does not follow a strict syllable count. Every word is ordinary except "foxed," which gets all the more attention for it.
What makes "Drunks" worth reading is its mix of comedy and compassion. It could have been a sneer at a pathetic ranter, but the turn to "I" makes it an admission, and the fear in the first couplet begins to look like something the speaker may share. In six lines, the poem moves from judging someone else to recognizing itself in him, and it does so with a joke about water.