In ten short lines, Dave Bonta takes a whole procession of ruined people from exhaustion to catastrophe. "The drunkards' progress" is built like a small mystery. The first stanza shows the damage, and the second names the culprit.
The opening image is odd and memorable: the drunkards are "spent and worn / as a bone of loss." A bone is what remains when everything else has gone, and a worn one suggests something gnawed, handled, bleached. Adding "of loss" turns the simile abstract, so they seem made of what they have lost. "Spent" also quietly suggests money, an idea the poem picks up later. Then comes "no fight in their belly." The usual idiom locates courage in the heart or the stomach, but "belly" fits better here, since the belly is where the drinking has gone. The defeat is physical, a body with nothing left in it. The stanza ends on a guess: "as if the wind / had beaten them." The line break after "wind" leaves the weather hanging there as the apparent villain. Wind is impersonal and blameless, and the speaker, watching from outside, sees the damage before understanding the cause.
The second stanza answers the guess. "o the bottle" is a sigh, lowercase and unpunctuated, half lament and half grudging admiration. Listen to the long o of "bone," "no" and now "o," which together form a kind of moan running through the poem. The bottle also turns out to be the real wind, because "beaten" and "bottle" share their opening sound and the second word replaces the first. Then comes the plain metaphor: "is a pretty woman." There is no "like" to soften it. "Pretty" is a casual, slightly dismissive word, suggesting a charm that is all surface and easy to fall for. The seductive woman who ruins men is a very old figure, and the poem borrows her rather than rethinking her. What matters is the effect. The bottle is the only one with agency, while the drunkards are "beaten" and "careening," things that happen to them.
The next lines turn deadpan: the bottle "accounts for the killing of some / and the careening of all / to disaster." "Accounts for" belongs to bookkeeping as well as explanation, and it connects with "spent" and "loss" earlier. A ledger runs under the poem, and the pretty woman is the one who keeps the books. The tone is almost clinical, like a coroner's report that follows a love song. The pairing of "some" and "all" widens the damage, since death takes a few but lost control takes everyone. "Careening" is a good choice. It describes a drunk's lurching walk, and the verb also has a nautical past, from tilting a ship onto its side. Either way it means moving fast with no steering.
The form matches this. There is no rhyme, no capital letters and no punctuation, so nothing in the second stanza applies the brakes. The first stanza's lines are short, between three and six syllables, and they drag like tired feet. In the second, the lines swell: "and accounts for the killing of some" is the longest, and "and the careening of all" keeps the momentum going. Both begin with "and," piling one consequence on another. Then the sentence spills over the line break into "to disaster," a short four-syllable landing. The syntax lurches and falls the way its subjects do.
The title explains why the poem works. "Progress" promises forward movement toward some goal, and here the movement is a sideways stagger and the destination is disaster. The poem never preaches or pleads. Its only show of feeling is that single "o." That restraint makes it sadder, because it treats the drunkards' ruin as a plain fact, as ordinary as weather, and it leaves the reader to supply the pity.