This Week's Homework

For fun, here's what I wrote for the homework assignment this week. We were to give a confessional as through the eyes of a pencil:

Graphite Confession
By Sarah J. Schlosser

Just between you and me, I want life to be shorter.
Every day I feel lighter, even though it hurts to have happen. They take a little more off the top, and my bodily ballast leans more and more to the eraser’s end. The only part I don’t like is their chewing, lips wrapped around my middle and teeth breaking my skin of yellow paint. I feel caught, like prey lynched by a big cat in the bush, jugular of graphite in danger. There’s a lot of slobber there from the kill, too, and the wood grows wet and softer to the touch, exposure of severance, and I run the risk of dividing in half with every strong approach.
So every time they take me to the sharpener I feel lighter, bolder even when I’m finer. I know that in this refinement sooner or later I will be perfect, all sharp and no more room for correction when my eraser flattens level to the brass fitting that holds it. My middle grip will be gone—no more chewing—and I would be all write. “All Graphite, All The Time.” I know that’s the end, that those are the rules: when you have attain perfect grace, that’s when you’re called home. Home in my case is a golf cart (I finally meet the height requirement to join that crowd) or the wastebasket, spearing a nest of ash blond hair pulled in a knit ball from a brush or a previous attempt at the Time crossword semi-completed in the blood of my archrival the Bic, the Gel Writer, or the plain old unerasable-you, the Pen.
Loss of life length is my dream. Good life is a life that is SHORT. Bring on the links or the remainder of the down clues.

Write on, dear reader.