Dave Bonta's "Drinkers" is a short, dense poem about drinking as both a shared fate and a private hiding place. The opening line, "we all burn in tune," makes drinkers a kind of choir, each person burning in harmony with the others. Burning suggests the sting of alcohol going down, but also a slow self-destruction. The word "instrumental" adds to this: the bottles seem to play a part in the music, and each "dying bottle" is both emptied and used up, like the people who drain it.
Then the poem turns inward. A "croft" is a small rented farm, a humble patch of one's own, and the speaker says that's what they find inside the bottle. To "burrow in" is what an animal does to hide or keep warm. The speaker seems to feel comforted and trapped at once. The mood is quiet, dark, and oddly tender: a sense of belonging, shadowed by the knowledge that this shelter is also a kind of burning down.