The Barmaid Waits

[Thunderembargo]

The barmaid cleans the pub with ease.
But keeps on an eye out on little things.              awkward phrasing, yet intriguing, standard phrasing: "keeps an eye", perhaps cliche
People get frisky on the piss covered floor.
Nothing is worth a hundred times more,               again, an unlikely, even awkward mathematical calculation, what about 50 times more?
 
Than to make a fool of yourself on the wood.
It keeps others from being misunderstood.
Where darkness covers most of the pub.
“Whatcha got little boy? We’ll put you in a tub”.
 
That is what an unknown gang would say.
But the barmaid keeps eyes out on things today.
Then with a clang of broken bottle glass.
The barmaid tells the gang to go somewhere fast.
 
With a push and a shove and a pull from the nose.
He tells them to get a life and to go home.
The barmaid has a job to blow the men down.
But takes a gun to the head without a sound.

I like the overall structure of the poem, not only the scene and the rhyme, but also the characters and the relationships, the tragic ending was unexpected and shocking, if not mildly horrifying --- there is, of course, dissonance between the cathartic scene of raucous and ribald bar scene commiseration and the psychosis of the barman, barmaid