The Realities of The Dead as Interpreted by a Living Poet
I promise to take you on a journey to an overlooked corner of the quotidian landscape. I’ll take you to the legacy of a thousand dead, and share my interpretation of what they were trying to say to me, with you! Also, when you understand from where my inspiration came, you can learn the method I used to always be inspired and never suffer poet’s block.
Death Became a Book!
When you finish reading The Matrix of Death, you’ll have a general knowledge of what to expect, if you play the “Reading-Between-The-Tombs” game. Just like I played it hundreds of times!
Reading-Between-The-Tombs is played like this: you go to a graveyard and start to read the names on the headstones. When you find a name that resonates with you, you also read the names on the second tomb to the left and on the second tomb to the right. There’s a high chance that the triad of names is going to express something with a high potential of perplexing you.
If you play this game long enough, a day might come that you feel so much inspired, you’ll write your own death poetry too.
The Graveyard has been Researched, Classified, and Tested!
The Matrix of Death, as a complete set of ebooks, features more than two-hundred poems that deal mostly with death, love, hate, and homesickness; written, all of them, in old and traditional forms.
In it, you’ll find poems in these forms: elegy, rondel, senryu, triolet, sestina, French, Italian, English and other types of sonnet, adage, ode, villanelle, ramals, rubaiyats, ghazal, and haiku.
The Matrix of Death decomposes into four volumes:
Volume 1 Shangaii of The Dead: comic and wondrous poems on joy, humor, sarcasm, curiosity, bewilderment, and mystery
Volume 2 Guffs of The Dead: moving and pathetic poems on sadness, pity, sympathy, disgust, depression, self-pity, the odious and loathsome, the compassionate, the disturbing and terrible, fear, anxiety, worry, irritation, and stress
Volume 3 Loves of The Dead: Amorous poems on love and beauty, devotion, the heroic, pride, confidence, and courage.
Volume 4 Homesickness of The Dead: Poised and peaceful poems on serenity, calmness, relaxation, and nostalgia.
More than two hundred poetic sneaks into the beyond in total!
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Excellent Poetry
Are you a reader of poets or a reader of poetasters?
I ask because, given the actual state of things, there is a high chance that you fall into the latter category. If you do, your poetry reading is working to your disadvantage.
It’s a disservice to you, since you’re reading psycho-analytic rants laid on the page like verse. Not true poetry. Just post-modern psycho-babble.
Others may argue that’s the way of writing poetry in the present. I think there’s something that’s hard to see at work in this situation.
I think that “contemporary” free verse poetry reflects, with its lack of structure, the poor approach to poetical work of their authors.
It also attests to a conformist, lacking in ambition modality. It impacts the author’s reputation negatively. But worst of all, it’s a poetry detrimental to the sound development of the poetic senses of those who read it.
The Matrix of Death is a perfect work of poetry. What do I mean by perfect work of poetry? I mean it's perfect in the syllabic sense. All the poems are symmetric, as the poem form rules dictate. A feature very hard to find, even in the masters. Even the few blank verse poems in it are syllabically perfect.
Return to Real Poetry Today!
I leave you with a haiku:
We part ways, for now...
If you really love poetry,
Then try these tomes!
I mean it, you can’t let The Matrix of Death pass! I wrote it in such a way that I feel you’re going to love it.
You can get any or all of the volumes, or you can wait until I publish them as a single book. Soon I will roll the four volumes into a single one. When I do that, acquiring a separate volume of this work might not be as cheap as it is today.
Yours in TRUE poetry,
Lex.
Death is Not Everything
About The Northern Colony
When I wrote The Northern Colony I felt I was writing poetry for the first time, even if I was writing poetry for ten years already. The original version of it had about half a dozen more long poems.
The ones I took out because, was because they weren’t at the height of the ones that made it to the book, which I see as real poetry.
Most of the poems in it are free verse. The mood is a carefree romp through memories of childhood, and some ambiguous explorations of the subconscious.
It took me fourteen years of compulsive hoarder disorganization and coming out of that, to curate, proofread, correct and edit those poems into an ebook, I hope they will entertain you when you read them.
I hope that these memoirs I call the Diary of a Death Poet will be of use to others. I’m trying to touch subjects and present problems on which I can give a little advice thanks to my experience.
The Diary of a Death Poet is by no means finished, for what I want to write initially to it, I’ve written only past the middle in entry numbers. In content size, I can’t tell. When I revise it I hope I would be able to balance all the entries to a becoming size each.
But the main purpose of this diary is to allow others to know me.
Someday, when I figure out how to organize my multiple identities on the internet I’ll be able to find a poetical way to open myself more.
My readers will deserve the grade of personal knowledge they will gain from such an opening. But they also will deserve to be presented with a poetical exposition on my multiple-identity, I will give them a coherent meta-narrative encompassing all of the personal stories of each of my identities.
It’s a long way to go, for me, to be able to produce such a creation. For starters, I must study the ones who came before me that did something similar, like for instance Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet, with his heteronyms.
Pessoa’s oeuvre is big and I’ve read a mere two books from it, but so far I’m loving it. The first book I’ve read of him was an anthology and had some of the Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis material.
That book was something general, but a dazzling introduction to Pessoa and I can say that after it, I was sold out to his poetry.
Yet, the second book I’ve read was a long yarn about life confined in a sterile job, I didn’t know what to expect and the subject of The Book of Disquiet astonished me.
It was a page-turner and I enjoyed it to the last page.
Even though Pessoa seems a bit lacking in the ass-kickers department—because of his reclusive and salaried accountant condition—I simply couldn’t take him as an accountant but as a poet, and the book’s poetic angle was great.
Now, to try to compete with Pessoa, who has ~80 recorded pseudonyms, is something that in these fast times I doubt someone would achieve, not at least with meaningful and deep poetical undertones like Pessoa, even in his prose, is.
Maybe the key for me is all about just taking his three main heteronyms Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis, and after not just having read all Pessoa wrote like them, but also reading studies done by others, and forming myself an Idea of what it was and how he did it, maybe then I’ll be able to create my take on multiple-identity publishing.
I dare you to go to a necropolis, cemetery, or graveyard where you won’t be remembered of gone relatives and give yourself a chance to learn the names and interactions between these names, the names of those who already left us and who in some way can end up convincing you that you are them and they are you.
If you pick up this challenge and if you do find these hypothetical meanings, sub-texts, flatteries and even attacks from the dead, I bet you may or may not want to chronicle the phenomena, I did, and The Matrix Of Death series is the consequence.
In mid-2004 I started to make the preliminary research for an epic saga of screenplays; I was lacking an Internet connection. I needed to create dozen of characters and one day I had the idea of going to a cemetery to see if I could find cool family names to use for my characters.
What awaited me there was not what I was looking for, though diverse categories were fitting the personalities of some of the characters I had in mind, a very different phenomenon captured my attention that winter evening.
I was reading the tombstones one after another, and each time I would find a name related to someone or something known and/or in any way related to me and/or present in my memory, there would be two attendant tombs of someone that along with the one that first called my attention would make sense like a narrative in a nutshell.
Think a set of three graves, to give an unlikely hypothetical example, as if Gary, Mira and Charlie were buried togehter, like Gilmore, Hindley, Manson. This hypothetical example would be a sign about serial kills, get it?
The poems for a while and then not only poems but also ideas and insights accumulated through several years, and only at the end of the quest, when I was about to reach the number of poems I wanted to write for a series, I came upon the knowledge of why this endeavor felt so important and intrinsically like a transcendental duty.
The subtexts underlying the cities of the deceased are impossible to ignore. A visit to the necropolis can sound like a somber prospect, or geeky at best.
But the fancy provoked by the roller-coasters of meaning that the families’ names form sometimes, as they seem to wink to literary annals or their evoking of feelings that are ultimately hard to convey to others, make for a feast when we are called to turn awareness inward and ask ourselves. “Could this be really happening?”
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—Rev. Jim Jones, Jonestown, Guyana, November 18 1978
Media Credits
Roberlan 1,2,3,4,5
Davidd: Crystal Skull
