"Catching the Chain" is a term used for being shipped out from one prison to the other. It inspired this poem, about the wait for the call that your bus is coming in the morning.
Catching the Chain
“I’m so over this place,” he said as if
in the saying of it he would have
sooner begun to leave it behind.
I, on the
Other hand, am rather
Under
this place.
One of the crumbs of a half-
eaten cake that remains beneath a plastic cover
keeping the last piece “fresh.”
But the air in here is stuffy.
The other crumbs as are ready as I am
to be eaten.
We ache to begin the journey into
someone’s moist mouth;
along the membraned tunnels,
to be transmogrified by
important enzymes and sharp juices
broken down to mere cells
left for hemoglobin
right for leukocytes
until, finally, what started as a cake
made with eggs and milk and love
returns to the world as a molecule
of salt or water or carbon dioxide
free
to be part of something bigger
again.
MCO 2004
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