The railroad tracks are near. We almost choke From filth whirled from the street and stinging vapors. Great engines vomit gas and heavy smoke Upon a north wind driving tattered papers, Dry dung and dust and refuse down the street. A circumambient roar as of a wheel Whirring far off--a monster's heart whose beat Is full of murmurs, comes as we retreat Towards Twenty-second. And a man with jaw Set like a tiger's, with a dirty beard, Skulks toward the loop, with heavy wrists red-raw Glowing above his pockets where his hands Pushed tensely round his hips the coat tails draw, And show what seems a slender piece of metal In his hip pocket. On these barren strands He waits for midnight for old scores to settle Against his ancient foe society, Who keeps the soup house and who builds the jails. Switchmen and firemen with their dinner pails Go by him homeward, and he wonders if These fellows know a hundred thousand workers Walk up and down the city's highways, stiff From cold and hunger, doomed to poverty, As wretched as the thieves and crooks and shirkers. He scurries to the lake front, loiters past The windows of wax lights with scarlet shades, Where smiling diners back of ambuscades Of silk and velvet hear not winter's blast Blowing across the lake. He has a thought Of Michigan, where once at picking berries He spent a summer--then his eye is caught At Randolph street by written light which tarries, Then like a film runs into sentences. He sees it all as from a black abyss. Taxis with skid chains rattle, limousines Draw up to awnings; for a space he catches A scent of musk or violets, sees the patches On powdered cheeks of furred and jeweled queens. The color round his cruel mouth grows whiter, He thrusts his coarse hands in his pockets tighter: He is a thief, he knows he is a thief, He is a thief found out, and, as he knows, The whole loop is a kingdom held in fief By men who work with laws instead of blows From sling shots, so he curses under breath The money and the invisible hand that owns From year to year, in spite of change and death, The wires for the lights and telephones, The railways on the streets, and overhead The railways, and beneath the winding tunnel Which crooks stole from the city for a runnel To drain her nickels; and the pipes of lead Which carry gas, wrapped round us like a snake, And round the courts, whose grip no court can break. He curses bitterly all those who rise, And rule by just the spirit which he plies Coarsely against the world's great store of wealth; Bankers and usurers and cliques whose stealth Works witchcraft through the market and the press, And hires editors, or owns the stock Controlling papers, playing with finesse The city's thinking, that they may unlock Treasures and powers like burglars in the dark. And thinking thus and cursing, through a flurry