This verse sits inside the woe poem, Proverbs 23:29–35.
Quick answer
After the bite, the disorientation: eyes seeing strange things, a heart producing twisted speech. The verse describes intoxication's assault on the two faculties Proverbs cares most about, perception and the heart's words.
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The poem has turned from the cup to its effects, and it will deepen the disorientation in the next verse until the drunkard himself speaks in the last.
Read the whole unit
The chapter's final saying is a six-part poem on drunkenness and the most artful treatment of addiction in ancient literature. It opens with six rapid-fire questions, who has woe, sorrow, contentions, complaints, causeless wounds, red eyes (v. 29), answers them in one line, those who linger long at the wine (v. 30), issues its single command, do not even look at the sparkle in the cup (v. 31), and then abandons commands entirely for description: the serpent's late bite (v. 32), the hallucinations and perverse speech (v. 33), the sensation of lying down in the sea, of sleeping at the top of a mast (v. 34), and finally the drunkard's own voice, beaten and numb and planning the next drink (v. 35). The poem never thunders. It lets the condition describe itself, and it closes without a verdict because the last sentence is the verdict.
What this verse contributes
This verse contributes the inward damage, and it chooses its targets knowingly. Eyes and heart are the instruments this whole chapter has been training: eyes to observe the father's ways (23:26), a heart to be guided in the way (23:19). Wine at full strength seizes both, the eyes now seeing "strange things," the heart now uttering what is perverse, the exact inversion of the wise heart producing right lips that made the father rejoice a few sayings ago (23:15–16). The poem is showing the son a counterfeit of everything wisdom promised him, formation run in reverse.
New King James Version®, Copyright © 1982, Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. Full copyright information. Scripture provided by API.Bible.
Go Deeper
If this verse has been used to put weight on you that it was never carrying, ask about it directly.