Soul Fatigue by Jeannie Wallace McKeown

Jeannie Wallace McKeown | November 24th, 2016 | a poem a day challenge, poetry | No Comments

Poet Bio

Let me eat people,
before they eat me
with their demands,
their insistences,
their anarchic desires;
consume tough stuff,
let it simmer in my gut
and my blood and my tendons –
all the things my flesh
is made of,
because my soul
is made of steel:
allowed to freeze
and to boil
but not tempered; it’s brittle.
Soul fatigue.
If I try to fly
it will crack,
into little shards
and mid-flight I will think
Oh shit
Oh shit
The damage went deeper than I knew.
Airborne, in triumphant defiance
but the cracks are advancing
faster than a camera can catch them.
My soul feels the wind
whistling through it,
it feels the fall
and a fall is always glorious.
Diving through air
thicker than myself,
to burn up on re-entry
because the atmosphere is toxic,
the atmosphere made me,
it broke me
and now it wants me back
at speed.

Poet Bio

Jeannie Wallace McKeown: writes poetry and prose creatively; works at a desk in a university but has also been a freelance writer covering academic lectures, seminars, book launches and interviewing interesting people; has had creative pieces published in literary journals and online; mother of two boys who can no longer be described as small; in a steady co-parenting relationship with an ex-husband, resolutely single and using poetry as one means of meeting this life head-on.

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