Donna, I think this has a lot of good points and a few bad ones, too.

Alcoholics are a difficult thing to write a song about and it's best left to people who have direct experience of having them in their lives, and the alcoholic of the song needs to be someone either worth feeling sympathy for or nasty enough that you to want to kill them. The inbetweens, like a bearded drunk man of Camden Town, who walks around the streets in cowboy hat, rambling to himself, but never hassling people, are too far gone and it's hard to have much of a feeling one way or the other about them.

So it's a big plus you've given you drunk a talent such as being an artist. The verses are mostly well written, but the chorus doesn't work at all, with the whole memory police thing sounding like something that belongs in a sci-fi film.

The biggest issue with this song is that it's written in the 3rd person as a kind of mini-novella, but what the actual relationship the singer has to the drunk is never established, therefore there is none. So how could a singer sing this song with any emotion when there is no relationship between him/herself and the subject of the song?

So perhaps it might be an idea to change the chorus, and include lyrics that let the listener know what the relationship between the drunk and the singer is. Perhaps it could a son singing to his father, imploring him to give up the booze, or imploring others not to look unkindly at his father because before his wife died (personally that would be better song than a divorce being the cause of alcohol problems) he was a great man, a kind man, and a good dad.

Just my opinions, no more valid than anyone else's.

Lucian