Lunch-Time Along Broadway

Twelve-thirty bells from a thousand clocks, the typewriter tacks and stops,
Gorged elevators slam and fall through the floors like waterdrops,
From offices hung like sea-gulls’ nests on a cliff the whirlwinds beat,
The octopus-crowd comes rolling out, his tentacles crawl for meat.

He snuffles his way by restaurants where lily-voiced women feast,
He pokes his muzzle through white-tiled caves, and gulps like a hungry beast,
He roots into subterranean holes, he sweeps hell’s tables bare,
His suckers settle and fix and drink like wasps on a bursting pear.

The wildcat quarrel of traffic soothes to a smooth rolling of tires
And the waterflow sound of the feeding brute as he pads by the cooking-fires,
His body shoulders the canyoned streets, his gluttonous mouths expand
And he laps the fat and flesh of the earth as a cat laps milk from a hand.

Slowly the greedy claws curl back, the feelers recoil and close,
The flood is setting the other way with the avalanche pound of snows,
Heavy and hot as a sated bee, enormous, slower than oil,
The beast comes shuffling to lair again, his lips still wet with his spoil.