serving cult

If you do not worship at the altar of your own work, why should anyone else kneel?

Let’s begin with some social media heresy:

not giving a fuck can be devotional.

Not the nihilist’s shrug, not the scorched-earth tantrum, but the luminous variety — the kind that cavalierly unhooks your throat from the polite noose of imagined judgment. The wild & unique kind that says: I refuse to pre-reject myself on behalf of strangers. Shame — old scamu, hot-cheeked old english sceomu — has had a bloody good run. It has kept us modest, manageable, marketable. It has trained us to present our poems like slightly, albeit intentionally, underseasoned canapés. Oh this? Just something small I made. Don’t mind me. Meanwhile, somewhere in the ruched velvet backalley of aesthetic history, Oscar Wilde is arching an eyebrow and coquettishly lighting a match with a wicked, all-knowing grin. He insists on a Jacobean banquet for all the senses. And now, so do we!

We know the trick now. We can see all the wires. We know that all modern myth is intricately orchestrated theatre, persona is thickly adorned lacquer, and legend is simply good mood lighting and even better timing. Not to mention the scraps of the cutting room floor just out of shot below the eyeline of the camera lens. But, despite the fact that we can see the stage machinery, we still refuse ourselves the glittering performance. Often, it is just fear in some very comfy slippers waiting for the kettle to finish boiling. We beat ourselves black & blue (black for prose, blue for poetry; naturally) with the invisible metre stick of mirage and artifice, measuring our backstage against someone else’s standing ovation. We whisper instead of declaring ourselves. We pluck away a delicately harmonious piano legato instead of conducting the roar of the orchestra. Well, they did always blame all the sax and violins.

Enough. Ça suffit! Basta!

We clearly need some new terminology here because the old words are more than a little tired. Swagger is close, but not quite. What we are after is a state between bare-arsed cheek and the audacity of the cult. A balanced blend of characteristically Charming.Unique.Luminous.Temerariousness that hums beneath the skin like a private overture in extra-fabulous trousers. Animated poise! Mythomagnetism! Egoalchemy! The deliberate act of turning self-belief into voltage. Be your own fucking monster, Victor’s busy. What with? Don’t ask. This is not arrogance, which is mostly just tarted up insecurity in a feather boa & someone else’s high heels. What we’re hoping for is a coherent golden thread in amongst some of the chaos. This is when your inner myth and outer behaviour finally shake hands and decide to be seen together in public. Of course, they’ll be skipping everywhere from here.

You do not follow a plucky rat up a drainpipe. You follow the piper. If he’s pied, even better! You follow the one who plays the tune as if the mountain will move because it has already moved inside them. Is he going to play whether the rats follow him or not? A kernel of confidence is not quite enough. Kernels are for popcorn & cults require a little more than a moment of combustion.

Yes, cult. Let’s not flinch. Cult is simply concentrated devotion. Didn’t we already talk about hyperfocus? Dopa-mining? A cult of one is still a cult. If you do not worship at the altar of your own work, why should anyone else kneel? And as someone who has written a lot of rather erotic poetry, you eventually want some of them to kneel. But do they worship, I hear you cry from the cheap seats? Who am I to say?? A gentleman never kisses and tells. Luckily, I am no gentleman! And I have nothing yet other than tell. He says coquettishly, pretending he’s lying.

You are building the cult of you — not because you are delusional (though a little strategic delusion never hurt a poet, and as the TikTokers like to say delusional is the solutional or something like that), but because you understand that attention gathers around conviction. Every writer with a readership is running a small, tasteful cult: shared language, shared references, shared pulse. A secret society of the initiated. Disciples of the great wordsmithery epicurean. The only question is whether you will find yours or hover outside someone else’s, waiting to be invited in. Spoiler alert: unless you can fit through the letterbox, you’re not getting in. And the bit of you that fits through the letterbox probably isn’t welcome uninvited.

We pretend we despise delusions of grandeur, and yet we devour the biographies of those who practised them with panache. Lord Byron didn’t merely write; he Byronic-ed. He curated scandal into immortality. Wilde didn’t just publish; he performed authorship as if it were an Olympic sport. Walt Whitman practically canonised himself in real time. Wrote his own reviews. Fuck it. They did not wait to be mythologised. They self-mythologised. They raised the magnifying glass up at the window and set fire to themselves. They served cult.

And we, hyper-literate & hyper-aware, seem only to further shrink. We say we are not perfect enough to speak on this. We say we are mid-process. We say “who am I to declare anything?” (Nod nod, wink wink) But myth is not built at the end of a lonely pilgrimage; it is built while you are still blistered and breathless. It is built when you decide that your story as an artist is not incidental to your work — it is the voltage running through it. Bring the monster to life! Joy is sharper when we know the wounds it grew from. Whimsy is more potent when we glimpse the wreckage it danced out of. Magnify the parts of yourself that refract through your writing. Do not fabricate. Intensify!

Want more weird words? Here, have a smattering.

This is egoalchemy: taking the base metal of self-doubt and smelting it into a signal that others can follow. This is mythopraxis: the daily act of behaving as if your voice carries. What about cultcraft: choosing a through-line and declaring it sacred? Fuck it. You are not asking people to do you a favour when you share your work. You are offering initiation into a super secret society of the cult of you. You are saying: here is a portal. Enter if you dare.

If you don’t believe in you, how exactly are you planning to lead the procession? How will you gather the acolytes & the accolades? How will you convince anyone that the ordinary object in your hand is a lump of philosopher’s gold and you’re happy to see them? The world does not rearrange itself around the apologetic. It tilts toward the temerarious. Book a table in a restaurant for you and 12 mates, all sit down one side of the table, and when the waiter comes over, pose as if he’s painting your suppertime madness. That’s proper dining al fresco!

So become a massive cult. Be an absolute cult. Not in the sense of manipulation, but in the sense of absolute devotion to your own aesthetic manifesto. Decide what you stand for and stand there ever so flamboyantly. Declare your movement, even if it currently consists of you, your notes app, and a slightly confused friend. Every empire began as a mood. One unifying joy-spilling infodumping event. A storm over a villa outside Geneva.

Charming. Unique. Luminous. TemerarioUS.

Yes, I capitalised the US. Because the cult of you is collective even before it is communal. It begins with the audacity to say: I matter in this arena. My work rearranges atoms. My voice carries. It may tremble, but it carries. I am an era-defining genius; if I say it, it will come into fruition, just maybe not within my lifetime, and I am definitely okay with that.

Have the bare-arsed cheek to be the ultimate cult.

Shame will still whisper. Let it. Invite it to watch. It does not get the final line. Consider it the spectre at the feast.

“Hunger is the best sauce in the world.”

I licked it from my fingers like prophecy,

wore it like armour,

named it desire,

called it holy,

& rode it bareback into legend.

Call me Don Queerxote!

You are a one-person odyssey. You are the one damn, queer hottie! No one else survives your story for you. No one else can cross your particular sea. You can either narrate yourself as a footnote or as a phenomenon. Both are technically available. Only one is interesting. For you, at least. And see? I just boldly quoted myself from my own book! What an absolute cult I hear them cry at me in the streets, I simply nod, wave, tip my hat, bow my legs, and fire a “you’re welcome” arrow in their direction. I’ve mixed my metaphors, and declared myself the greatest cult who ever lived.

Serve cult.

now, if you wouldn’t mind just signing here…

Ryan.xx

Speaking of not asking people for a favour when you ask them to share, comment, or like your stuff. I’m not asking. I’m telling you!

Buy our bloody books, or else! We have tiny, tiny pitchforks, and we know just where to tickle!

They’re awesome, they’re saucy, they’re funny, they’re tender, they’re the best poetry books ever written by two co-conspiring mood-milking’ feral bisexual weirdos in excellent outfits who ever lived (sorry Byron, you’re not invited, mate!)