Lethargic and drunk, the strange old man
with bottle in hand, meandered across the field.
Staring ahead as best he could, held onto his hat
With vision zooming this way and that.
There stood a cottage at the edge of the treeline,
“Shelter from this scorching heat, and just in time.”
The man guzzled down what remained of his Rye,
Delirious and deranged, strange lights did he spy.
On further inspection he claimed them to be
“Ten tiny fairies, belonging to me.”
Swiftly he trapped them in that not-quite-empty bottle
He demanded they dance or threatened to throttle
They flew, and they flew, growing rapidly dimmer
In all that heat they simply did simmer
Till all of a sudden, his ‘fairies’ were drunk
Poor little fireflies, to the bottom they sunk.
There’s something profound about this poem. The progress of the story drew me in and along to the end.
It reads like a dramatic monologue in that it’s from the POV of the drunken man. He doesn’t know the damage he’s done but we, the readers, do.
But it’s not a dramatic monologue because he is not the speaker; an omniscient narrator is. If you want, you could re-write to change the “he” to “I”, etc. to make it dramatic monologue and — perhaps — give it a different effect. Of course, you would have to change a few other words such as “the strange old man” (interestingly, one of the lines that does not rhyme). Something like this?
Lethargic and drunk, with bottle in hand,
I meandered across the field ????
BTW: It took awhile before I realized you were rhyming. Maybe because the first two lines don’t. I like that the rhyme doesn’t call attention to itself.