The last line of "Soberiety" sounds like a boast but works as a confession: "I've been sober for months." The speaker wants to be over a lost love, and he treats this as a kind of recovery, with love as the drink he has given up. The poem is built around the gap between what he says and what he keeps doing, which is thinking about her. He announces his cure while showing every symptom of the illness.
The drinking metaphor runs through the whole poem and is surprisingly well sustained. Thinking about love again is like craving "wine or champagne when you're still hung-over", a wish that arrives at exactly the wrong moment. Love itself is "a dreadful concoction", and the speaker is baffled that "people like to keep on drinking." Even his own title belongs to this idea. "Soberiety" is a coined word, close to "sobriety" but with an ending that echoes words like "anxiety," and I'd read that as a hint that being sober here is less a calm achievement than a nervous condition. The poem backs this up when it says sobriety "comes like a stab to the side." Clarity doesn't feel like triumph. It feels like an injury you didn't see coming.
The most memorable image is the memory of the woman's hands, "as cold as uncooked cordon blu." It is funny, and it is also a deliberate letdown. A romantic memory is compared to a frozen supermarket meal, and the clash between tenderness and the mundane gives the moment its honesty. The same everyday register appears in "the package deal," a phrase from commerce that the speaker uses to shrug off pain, and in the sitcom "everybody but you hates," a small, comic picture of an embarrassing private fondness. Love is something he can only talk about through ordinary, slightly silly things. That may be how he protects himself from the feeling.
The memory itself is shaky. "I think she was scared or maybe it was me / I dunno, I couldn't remember." The speaker has just said he "remembered," and now he admits he can't. Then comes the flat, ironic "That was great," on a line of its own, followed by the consoling "Well, at least I held her hand / It even took me a bloody month." His shyness is both touching and comic, and his sarcasm keeps the pity at arm's length.
Formally, the poem is free verse that sounds like speech. There is no regular rhythm or rhyme scheme, only the odd accidental echo, such as "day" and "anyway" near the start. Lines run long and loose, as though he is talking himself through a morning, and then they snap short: "That was great." "Nah." The ellipses in "Or maybe... Just maybe..." act as pauses where he nearly says something true, and the clipped line "A part of me still hopes" is the closest he comes. His phrase "conscious Deja Vu" is also revealing. Déjà vu normally happens to us without our choosing, so calling it "conscious" suggests he is choosing to revisit the memory while pretending it merely turned up.
The ending shows the poem's skill. After admitting hope, he cancels it with "Nah. I don't think so," and then offers his only evidence: he has been sober for months. Counting time is what people do when they are guarding something fragile, and a person who is truly finished with a feeling rarely keeps the tally. The final line is meant to close the case, but it reads as a man reassuring himself.
What makes "Soberiety" worth reading is how recognisable it is. Many people have been surprised by a memory on an ordinary morning, then argued themselves out of it with a joke and a shrug. The poem doesn't resolve that struggle, and it doesn't pretend to. It leaves the speaker in the middle of it, claiming a strength he hasn't quite proved, and that uncertainty is what makes it ring true.