I like reading pantoums, mainly because I don’t read them often enough to appreciate the form, but I’ve never read one this long, and I’m not sure it holds up well through the long lined stanzas. Some of the early stanzas are well done and most of the ending stanzas are sub-par. Primarily, I would blame this on the dialog and fragmented prose.

The first time you use a quote feels awkward--“Chase”—because in the preceding stanzas you marked the man as a stranger. The reversal in the punctuation doesn’t feel authentic, but forced. And there is a lot of the feeling throughout this piece, where dialog is fragmented, and not in a colloquial speech type of fragmentation, but in an unbelievable sense. You can see this again in the third stanza when the bus driver starts his clearly opinionated dialog by saying “To me,” which comes out as awkward. First, you start to wonder how the bus driver knows her. Then you wonder why he just provided his opinion. Then you just start thinking he’s a jerk.

There’s also a problem with pronouns in third and fourth stanza, and probably elsewhere, when you change the character being identified but use the same non-descriptive pronoun: he. When you use a pronoun it refers to the most recent subject, but you’re trying to have the pronouns shift around between bus driver, son, and passenger, which can’t be done grammatically with the pronoun alone. It ends up a mass of confusion and awkwardness.

I notice your end words aren’t particularly strong as well. There are pronouns, prepositions, articles, conjunctions that outweigh the strong verb/noun endings. I think one of the reasons this is happening is that the narrative is so long you’re being forced to use prosaic language to facilitate your transitions and there is no one to smoothly embed so many. The narrative of the piece reads fair enough, ignoring all the grammatical issues, but it doesn’t feel improved by this form.

All the dialog, dialog within dialog, and the corresponding punctuation create a certainty with proper grammar that the lines fail to upheld. It’s does not appear as skirting the line for creative reasons as much as looking inconsistent, which ends up detracting from the reading. Each time a jarring fragment emerges from a previously smooth repeton the flow is handcuffed. And there are plenty of nice lines that read worse than before when I get to them again.

I’ve written a few pantoums I absolutely hate and the main reason is because I know I haven’t skillfully manipulated the repetons around in their new context. I never go back to them because it is a tiring and perpetual hunt for insignificant, too restrictive language. In this piece, with all the prose phrasing, there’s a lot that you could cut without hurting the narrative, but that would further jar the grammatical flow. It’s certainly a handful of a form, and I think the best thing to take away is knowledge of what was easiest and hardest to accomplish.

I bet if you tried another pantoum after this, which is short and doesn’t contain such a strong narrative or dialog, you would be able to produce a better piece. I just think the style is not conducive to a long narrative. This would be a lot of work to evaluate and rewrite, so I wouldn’t advise going that route. Not that revision isn’t great, but I’m not sold on all the dialog. Prose paragraph perhaps, but not pantoum. You clearly have a good understanding of how to manipulate your repetons, but this piece lacks a sensitivity to the extremely tight diction required in a pantoum. I suspect after this, a short pantoum would be a breeze. 8 or 12 lines will feel like a respite compared to this and will be easier to revise.

You could also try summarizing the narrative and reworking this piece with only the necessary plot points and not the fluff in-between. Then you could cut a lot of prosaic language as well as skirt grammatical form without it feeling as awkward. And by viciously cutting the superfluous dialog to pull out the fundamental lines you might come out with a tighter shorter piece.