Self-Ashtualisation

Gosh! Note that beginning a poem with that G-word I’ve just randomly and unjustly assigned to this one is a bit poetic-pathetic-grammatically, not quite incorrect. Imperfect? I mean just look at those absurd hyphenations hahaha! My mess is a bit of a life, isn’t it? Or should I absolutely stop that rubbish charade? Perhaps righting the wronged life by focusing on bribing mine would help. Just saying.   ‘Ashley needs to stop herself from turning into ashes,’ writes the red pen that is my right hand, upon detaching itself from me. Its ink shouts too loud, whizzing in my boiling ears as they’re nearly fried of heart, or perhaps art attack, no thanks to my wasted choice, grandiosely and gingerly called deflection, daughter of my time thief, agile beyond repair, so I need to prepare to face the music – explosive ears’ tellings-off, to be most exact.   Getting myself together used to be the ugliest words my ears have ever heard, but now in desperation, eac

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

   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