Dave Bonta's "Self-medication" fits into four lines one strange, memorable image: a body kept in a bottle. The title puts us in the territory of treating yourself without a doctor, and the obvious suspect is drink, though the poem never names an illness. Judging by the imagery, what needs treating is some kind of cold or loneliness, since the remedy the speaker reaches for is warmth and company. The central idea is a closed circuit. The speaker is the bottle, the drink, the drinker and the guest all at once, and has turned a private habit into a whole social world with one inhabitant.
The first two lines set up the puzzle. "keeping my body in a bottle / to take and talk to" has no main verb of its own, only the dangling "keeping," which makes the habit feel ongoing, something that has no start or finish. The speaker also says "my body" as if it were a possession, which splits the self in two: an "I" who owns and a body that is owned. The bottle could be a drinker's bottle, or a jar for preserving a specimen, and the poem lets both readings sit together. "Take" works two ways as well. You take a dose of medicine, and you take something along with you. Then comes "talk to," which no one says about medicine. The bottle is both remedy and confidant, an object that cannot answer, which is exactly what makes it a safe listener.
The pivot comes in lines three and four, where the poem's best sound effect lives: "I drink myself warm / I think myself a very pleasant present." Drink and think rhyme perfectly, and they sit in the same spot in matching lines, so changing one letter carries you from the act to its result. The drink produces the thought. The grammar adds to the oddity, because "myself" is the object of both verbs. You normally drink a drink and think a thought, but here the self is what gets swallowed and also what gets imagined. "Drink myself warm" also quietly turns a familiar phrase upside down. "Drink yourself to death" or "to sleep" points toward ruin, while this speaker ends up merely warm. The restraint is part of the poem's sadness, since the speaker wants nothing dramatic, only a little comfort.
The last line rewards slow reading. "Pleasant present" is almost an echo, with the same opening *p* and a shared *-sant* ending, so the line sounds pleased with itself. "Present" means a gift, which implies a giver and a receiver, and here both are the same person. It can also mean the present moment, the *now* that the warmth makes bearable. Then there is "think myself," which in everyday speech often carries a hint of irony, as in "he thinks himself very clever." The pleasantness may be a belief the drink allows rather than a fact. "Very pleasant" is also the language of polite company, the kind of remark made about a dinner guest. The speaker sits on both sides of the table, host and guest, flattering and being flattered.
The form supports all this. The poem has no capital letters, no punctuation and no full stop, so it never officially ends, and the loop of drinking and thinking could simply start again. By my count the line lengths run nine syllables, then five, five, and eleven. The two short middle lines move like swallows, and the long final line lets the warmth spread. The vocabulary is plain throughout (bottle, take, talk, drink, warm), and that plainness keeps the tone ambiguous. It is tender, a little comic, and quietly bleak.
The poem is worth reading because it neither condemns nor celebrates its speaker. It lets us feel the appeal of the habit and its cost in the same breath. In a handful of small words it shows how a person can build company out of nothing but themselves, and it leaves us unsure whether that is a clever consolation or a lonely trick. The reader has to decide, and the answer probably changes depending on which line you linger on.