i. Corax

Playing darts with an atlas of glass, do I get
a pass or am I missing the mark when I
say this is a perfect opportunity for us to cross-promote
our brands? Should I get lost for taking too much
of a chance? Let you get crass at me for
wanting to smash? The point is that I can’t stand
having no one’s hand to hold as I wing it
in my expansion from neophyte to initiate in love’s mysterious

               ii. Nymphus

land, crashing whenever we dance at a distance around this
delirious wanting to get down, I can’t swallow it, this
shallowness of being a man, of only ever seeing the
end result without factoring in the effort, never having a
plan, sending you an admixture of conflicting messages, letting my
Self be had by someone I never wanted to have,
panning the flash of a temper’s flaring crowd, signalling the
distress of my loneliness by being so damned loud in

               iii. Miles

my art and deafeningly quiet in the living of my
#ExileLife, suppliant-to-defiant when heaven’s eye goes blind, neon sighing electric
and relentless, reckless in my erection of thinly-veiled defences ineffective
against revealing my emptiness, failed mechanisms of which I’m not
proud, drowning at the bottom of an awful glass that’s
half-full for anyone else who has the sense to accept
this, that a good friend’s more than good enough when
the damage done scares others off, with a mouth like

               iv. Leo

a Mithræum you’re better than I am at this stuff,
at letting in only those who are up-to-snuff, always knowing
what’s going on behind the scenes when the director shouts
‘Cut!’, behind what we’re saying when guys like me slide
inside your mind while sidling up to what can’t be
defined, quiet as fire laying down a trail to conspire
against liars who laid with rival desires, talking shit against
our forefathers, sharing in common one origin manifesting over and

               v. Perses

over in several ancestors, no sin more original than his,
the one dying sun who rises again whenever we reunite
and recombine our forces to lift up his head, horned
with a crescent, the bull whose neck blunts our knife,
metaphorical and metaphysical no matter how we slice it, this
myth which tortures us into a routine of sorceries, turning
me ornery as primordial Taurus whose throat spills what the
kids all call the twelve days of Christmas but whose

               vi. Heliodromus

real gift is the secret rite of Mithras, more sacred
to me than shopping is to them, what I want
to call Us is the reason why I trouble my
Self to write this, apostolic as I main-line the first
hit, deep in it now as I abandon rhythm for
ritual, rhyme for finding a cure for what makes me
miserable, killing the momentum to purge the sentimental only to
find my Self less-than-capable, more sack-of-shit than sacramental,

               vii. Pater

unworthy of any laurels but this crown when I can’t
even put down in words what hell it is to
struggle to tell how far I’ll go to show you
I’m no angel but I know the way from sorrow
to salvation isn’t a road, it’s a month below zero,
a season of freezing-out those who don’t know that in
this story, I’m not my own hero, for once what
I’m on about is something relatable: the impossible task of

making asking someone out marketable, selling of a soul subliminal.