Six short lines, three pairs, and not one full stop. Dave Bonta's "Maudlin" sketches a drunk without once letting him do anything in the present tense. He "would kiss" and he "would remain": the verbs are all conditional, as if the poem were describing a habit, or a type, rather than a single night. The central idea is that drunken sentimentality is a kind of helplessness. The drunk is overflowing with affection, but it has nowhere particular to go, and the poem's loose, unfinished grammar mirrors that.
Take the opening phrase, "discourse furred with the first / love of a drunk." "Discourse" is a stiff, formal word for talk, and "furred" drags it down into the body. We think of a furred tongue, or of speech gone soft and fuzzy at the edges. What coats the talk is "the first love of a drunk," and the phrase is slippery. It might be the drunk's long-lost first sweetheart, who keeps surfacing in his rambling. It might equally be the drink itself, the thing he loved first and loves best. The poem doesn't choose, and the uncertainty suits a speaker who can't quite choose his words either. The line break also helps. Line one ends on "first," so the word "love" arrives a beat late, as if the sentence had stumbled on its way to it.
The second pair of lines is the most unsettling: "who would kiss / anybody for a curse." The break after "kiss" briefly leaves the drunk's affection hanging in the air, and then "anybody" widens it to include everyone. The final phrase can be read two ways. He might kiss people in place of cursing them, so that affection and aggression become interchangeable moods. Or he might kiss anyone who curses him, so that even abuse counts as attention. Either way, this is the real meaning of "maudlin." The word is usually used for weepy, indiscriminate sentiment, and its history lies in the weeping figure of Mary Magdalene, so the title already carries a hint of penitence and tears. Bonta's drunk is capable of love, but it is love without a target, and so it comes close to being a kind of hunger.
The last pair of lines brings the poem down, literally: "who surrendering to the ground / would remain in doubt." "Surrendering" is the vocabulary of battle, or of romance, and here the one who gives in is simply falling over. We expect the sentence to end with him lying there, safe at last on the ground. Instead the final phrase is "in doubt." The one solid thing in the poem cannot settle him. The poem stops without punctuation, leaving him suspended between falling and understanding.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are short and uneven, running from three syllables ("who would kiss") to seven ("who surrendering to the ground"), so the rhythm lurches rather than marches. The anaphora of "who… who…" works like a stagger. Each relative clause attaches itself to "a drunk" and then wanders off, and the subject never receives a main verb to anchor him. Sound does quiet work too. "Discourse" and "curse" echo each other across the poem, so that talk and cursing seem to be made of the same material. "Love" and "drunk" share a dull, thudding vowel, which links the tender word to the clumsy one. "Ground" and "doubt" chime on their open vowel, tying the fall to the uncertainty.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does without commentary. Bonta doesn't scold the drunk or mock him, and he doesn't excuse him either. By building the poem from a single, unfinished sentence, he lets the form carry the judgment: this is what it is to be so full of feeling that you lose control of the grammar of your own life. A poem this small leaves us with a surprisingly human figure, lonely, affectionate, and not sure of anything, not even the floor.