RBST

Here are some notes

The first sentence reveals the principal 'problem' or tension in the poem; the narrator's bus conductor only has one kidney and it may soon 'go on strike,' or fail, because of 'overwork' - i.e. because it has to do the work of two kidneys. However the method of presenting the organ is personal, relating the function of the kidney to human activities, such as jobs and strikes. This might have the effect of making the problem more immediate.

Throughout the poem, certain pairs of words are stuck together, as if they intrinsically form a single concept. For example, the bus conductor is a 'busconductor,' and there are also 'fat factorygirls,' an 'oldman,' and 'busticket[s].' I think the implication is that the noun is almost inseparable from its descriptor; the fat girls from the factory are defined by their working at a factory, just as the elderly man who doesn't fully retain his mental capacities is defined by his age. But at the same time a 'busconductor' becomes a quite impersonal term for a human being, which I think reflects the distance between us as individuals and the hundreds of people we meet but forget as soon as they're out of sight; the waiters and taxi drivers and pilots and so on of the world. In this poem an impersonal concept is made very personal; the narrator becomes aware of the humanity of the people around him through this sudden glimpse of mortality.

Another theme in the poem is one you'd probably expect from any account of a person who knows he's about to die: the rediscovery and renewed appreciation of things in life that are ordinary, yet undeniably beautiful. 'And the sky / was it ever so blue?' is the perfect example of this; like the sun, most people on earth see a blue sky every day, and yet it never quite loses it's appeal. Also the phrase 'as through new glasses,' in reference to the way the bus conductor sees the streets (differently), draws this emotional reaction into physical terms.

There's also several cases of personification. As mentioned before, the kidney is given human qualities, and similarly the bus driver 'goes gently' (alliteration) to the 'bedroom' of the bus 'to collect'. I'm not sure exactly what this refers to; I think it might mean the bus station (what do you call it?) where buses end up at the end of the day, as if to sleep. I guess the word 'collect' here could refer to getting gas or something similar, I never take the bus and I live in Japan so I don't know anything about this system, but you could explore this in more detail.

The last four lines are rich in the sort of things you could analyze: 'deepdown in the deserted busshelter of his mind,' is a great one, combining as it does alliteration with the words that are stuck together, besides the relation of the conductor's work to the workings of his own mind. It's as if he has, in the (presumably) many years of driving a bus, taken on some of the qualities of the world of buses. Or maybe this reflects the narrator's fundamental attribution error (a concept from psychology, which I've never taken so don't know much about, but the basic idea is that we tend to attribute too much to people's personalities and not enough to the situation) in thinking of a person who drives buses in terms of the driving of buses. Either way it's quite a lonely, sorrowful description, though maybe a touch humorous. In a way the whole poem is narrated humorously or ironically, but at the same the sheer seriousness of the topic makes it, to me, quite poignant. And then the line with 'his journey nearly done' could also be seen in the context of the driving of a bus, which goes on a trip and eventually returns to the 'bedroom'. There's a certain circularity in this system of working a bus; next morning the bus leaves the bedroom again and next night, most likely, it returns again. To me there's a hint of this circularity, this parallelism, in the last pair of lines, where the narrator says that the conductor will one day die, unpredictably: one day he'll go to work and never come back or leave and never go to work again. In the context of driving buses this happens too, when buses for example are changed for new ones, and in a way the replacement of buses is analogical to the replacement of the bus driver, which will probably be efficient and almost unnoticed. I'm rambling on here now, ignore these last few lines.

Overall the main themes of the poem, I would say, are the rediscovery of what it means to be alive (by the bus conductor) and the realization of the humanity of people s/he takes for granted, on the part of the narrator.

Hope this helps a little!