A missionary is supposed to be someone who remembers: who carries a message, keeps a purpose in view, and travels far to deliver it. Dave Bonta's poem gives that title to a speaker whose mission is "to drink" and who admits, almost in the same breath, "I forget many things." The joke is gentle, but it stings a little. The sacred errand has shrunk to a thirst, and the only person left to convert is the speaker.
What the drinking is for stays open. Alcohol would fit the casual tone and the forgetting, but "drink" is also what we do with views, music and company, when we "drink them in." The poem never names an object, so the verb stays unquenched. Forgetting, meanwhile, seems less a side effect than part of the bargain. The mission is a way of setting things down, and the title makes the irony sharper, since a missionary is the figure who is not supposed to lose the thread.
The poem is built from seventeen words in two couplets, with no punctuation at all. That absence matters. The first couplet can be read as one sentence, "on a mission to drink I forget many things," in which forgetting is the consequence. It can also be read as two separate confessions set side by side. The poem never settles which, and the reader has to decide how much of the forgetting is chosen and how much simply happens. The white space between the couplets does the work of a full stop, and the poem also refuses to end with one. It simply stops, as though the evening were still going on.
The second couplet turns from errand to scene. "Dancing with myself" is a familiar idiom, and it holds joy and loneliness together. Dancing suggests music, a floor, other people, and "with myself" quietly removes all of them. Then comes the best word in the poem, "together," at the end of "after a little talk together." Only one person seems to be present, so the "together" must mean the speaker and his own other half, an inner conversation that reads like a private sermon. A missionary preaches to crowds, and this one has an audience of one, who is also the preacher. The word "little" is wonderfully slippery. It sounds modest and companionable, and it is also exactly how people shrink an evening's drinking when they describe it afterwards. The word "after" adds a sequence. First the talk, then the dance, as if the conversation settled something and gave permission. That is an inference, but the order of the lines supports it.
There is no rhyme, but the sound is carefully loose. "Drink" and "things" are a slant pair, sharing a short i and a nasal ending, and the m, n and ng sounds in "mission," "many," "things," "dancing" and "together" give the whole poem a soft, slightly slurred texture. The rhythm helps. The short second and third lines are quick, and the fourth is the longest, rolling out over "a little talk together" and trailing off on its unstressed last syllable like a step that never quite lands. In a poem with no capitals at the start of its lines, the lone capital "I" stands out. It is the one upright thing in a poem about forgetting and swaying.
The poem is worth reading because it does so much with so little. The title sets up a grand, serious figure, and four plain lines let the air out of him without cruelty. The speaker is neither mocked nor excused. He may be a bit foolish, a bit lonely, or quietly free, and the poem leaves all three possibilities open. For a student, it shows how a title can reframe everything that follows, how leaving out punctuation can create ambiguity, and how a poem this small can still hold a whole character.