The wharfie

[RiverNotch]

I toil on the wharfs, all day I see
Magnificent ships that'll never carry me,
Welts on my back rise from the foreman's whip
If I fail to fully stock a single ship

I am fated to be a lowly stevedore,
loading and unloading, nothing more,
Shouted at by a toff all day and night,
I resolve to set his vessel alight

Ever-careful not to be seen,
I douse his deck with gasoline
I cut the ropes from the cleats
And set him and his yacht adrift

The punctuation's a bit awkward in the first stanza: the commas there should be periods, and there should be a period at the end. The last line of the second stanza does run too short, and again, that should be two sentences, not one. The third stanza, too, should be set in two sentences, not one. I know this is poetry, and punctuation in the art could be missing as a choice, but the choice of leaving them behind here is either unclear or nonexistent, so that they just end up detracting.

The slightly awkward rhymes and the springy meter work very well with the story. By the last line of the second stanza, the rhythm is gutted, and everything becomes somewhat stilted, but I guess that could be the point of the poem, with the snapping of the wharfie's character. I think the story runs incomplete at this point, however, for three things. First, the first line of the last stanza is completely unnecessary: what does it say of the stevedore, of the whole act, that we can't already infer? Second, the action is incomplete: the stevedore resolves to set the vessel alight, but, well, doesn't. Third, there's a thought about to precipitate there, some wholesome remark that would settle the snapping of the wharfie's character with the calm, thoughtful nature of his thoughts in the first six lines, but it simply doesn't: perhaps a final couplet to end the whole thing, to round everything off?