A string of Christmas lights still up in the middle of June is a small, embarrassing joke, and the poem opens on it: "too bad it's the middle of june / and my Christmas lights are still up." It sounds like a throwaway apology for a messy house, but it sets the terms for everything after. Something that belonged to another season has outstayed its time, and the speaker hasn't managed to take it down. If the lights went up for Christmas, they have hung there for about half a year, and the thought of "you" has lingered in the same way. That is an inference from the imagery, but the poem seems to invite it.
The comparison leads to the central idea: sobriety takes away an alibi. A "drunk thought" is one you can excuse in the morning, because the alcohol put it there. The second stanza strips that excuse away: "you're no longer a drunk thought." The phrase "for once I'm sober" hints at a habit of drinking, and the "but" that follows turns the line on its heel. The speaker is clear-headed and the other person is still "on my mind." The title names the very thing the poem declares finished. What remains is a sober thought, which is harder to wave away because it can only be the speaker's own.
The poem is built as two blocks that behave differently. The first is three short, conversational lines, the last left without a full stop so that it trails off instead of concluding. The second starts with a flat, short statement and then stretches into one long sentence, hinged on a semicolon and another "but," that tumbles on until it runs out of room. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The rhythm is that of someone talking, and the pile-up of "or the jack daniels, or even the Jose Cuervo" has the loose, over-extended feel of a night of drinking. The surface is casual too: a lower-case "june," brand names left uncapitalised, and what looks like a slip in "stong" for "strong." These details give the voice a private, unpolished quality.
The list of drinks is both the funniest and the saddest part. Vodka, Jack Daniels, Jose Cuervo: a clear spirit, a whiskey, a tequila. The speaker seems to have worked through the whole shelf, each name a failed attempt to drown the thought. The line "when the vodka did" is shrewd, because it makes the alcohol "go away" like a person leaving, and the speaker expected the other person to leave with it. Notice also how the word "thought" keeps turning up: "drunk thought," "I thought you would go away," "the thought of you." The mind circles one word the way it circles one person.
The ending completes that circle. After three drinks, the poem returns to vodka in the form of Grey Goose, and the comparison is precise: the thought is "as stong as the first sip." The first sip is the strongest, the sharp burn before numbness sets in. So the speaker is saying that the feeling has never dulled, and every time it arrives it feels like the first time. Then the line breaks and leaves "goose" alone on the last line. It is a slightly absurd place to land, an animal's name dangling after all that longing. The awkwardness works in the poem's favour, because it undercuts self-pity and lets the speaker laugh at themselves while admitting defeat.
The poem is worth reading for how much it does with so little. It gives no explanation of who "you" is and doesn't need one. The person stays a presence defined only by the failure of everything meant to remove them. The name given as the author, escape_artist, seems to play on the subject, since the one trick the speaker can't perform is escaping a thought. That is a reading of the name, though, not a fact about whoever chose it. It is a modest poem, but its insight is honest and easy to recognise: you can empty every bottle and still be left with the feeling you were trying to blame them for.