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Showing posts from October, 2022

‘Lanternising the Burnt-Out Candle’: A Poem

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Teachers are like candles, extinguishing themselves to fight—oops—light their students’ paths, or so they say as sweat and blood, ignited by the fire of self-denial drip-drip-drip on and on and on and down in the form of candle wax singeing every inch of our collected, collective bones no longer humanly recognisable, shadowed by selfless shadows.   I am, not so, but too sorry to tell you Miss M, that unfortunately your candle wax has scorched my renewing, six-year-old skin the most. I’m rubbing one of the mottled patches now, the pain has hardened, been harnessed, intensified, just like – or probably very different to – the door you’ve used to bar yourself from self-love, the same one that has served you well into your relentless, hot-headed, cold-hearted wax-dripping candlehood, which I’ve now realised, perhaps too late, is born out of your burnt-out selflessness.   If I had known then what you’d been through, Miss M, I would have spoken to you

Receiving My First Rejection Email on 1 Sep and Other Updates

   Gosh! I am so tempted to start this post with, ‘Duh. The end of the first half of my post,’ which, through this confession, I have. The ‘duh’ in question is none other than the (spoiler alert) first half of this post, as that part of the title, ‘Receiving My First Rejection on 1 Sep’ has suggested. To lengthen the short story, it was 8pm on 1 Sep in my part of the world when the email concerning my first submission to a literary agent arrived in my inbox. To my surprise, my often-dramatic heart did not palpitate. My palms did not itch and my stomach did not flutter either. Not sure how, but I was as stoic as, well, someone who was diametrically opposite to me. Calmly then, I opened the email to find my first ever rejection from a literary agent. Unfortunately they could not offer me a representation, they began. Due to the high volume of submissions, they could not provide specific feedback. However, they explained, it could just be that my novel did not match their personal prefe

‘Deep, Intense, Serious, Sensitive’: An Acrostic Poem

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Dream’s lucidity cannot be priced or prized in so far as enlightenment is to concern itself by being too concerned with all those expensive feelings that cannot be prised from my tight fists, feasting upon your treasured robots.   ‘Intention is everything,’ you say through your remaining robot, not looking me in the eye when I confront you about your stale hypocrisy that tepid heart toys me in its touch engrossing itself in the game called ‘still caring’, pretending, not caring that I have stopped putting a price tag on your, in hindsight, not quite expensive, copy-pasted words.   Solemn still waters in that preserved, artificial self energetically claim that every time you say you believe in me, I am right to believe that you mean it, meaning irrespective of the untruth, you demand the benefit of my, not quite doubt, out, so I won’t accuse you of causing me unduly pain, shutting me up in the most efficient way you can think of.   ‘Show me th