On this article I will tell you about the saga, and I will teach you an inspirational technique to write poetry. If you need inspiration to write poetry, you could try this. This method has served me well for years. The inspiration never stopped and it could have gone on and on, but after more than 200 successful poems I decied enough was enough.
Thanks for being interested in The Matrix of Death!
One of my reasons to live is to deal death. But since I don’t do that literally, do it figuratively, bringing to you a long collection of poems.
The Matrix of Death is my interpretation of something I call The Lexical Death Trip, LDT. The LDT is a phenomenon I discovered playing a game I invented. A game that I Call “The Read Between The Tombs Game™.” And what’s that weird game I’m talking about? It’s something very simple.
A few things you’ll need:
1) A Graveyard to go to
Preferably an urban cemetery or necropolis. The bigger the better. You need this because having a large surplus of tombs, crypts, and vaults to source ideas will increase the chances of finding the signs and symbol sets we will be looking for.
2) A Notepad
Or any other means to be able to record what you find.
3) Time in your hands
And a means to measure it. It’s better if you carry some means of measuring time with you. For several reasons. The most important one is this. Once you set out to hunt signs, the first time, you should try for at least two hours.
After the first hour, the signs are probably going to start appearing, if they didn’t appear as soon as you started. In the case that you have been walking by ninety minutes or more and didn’t find anything of interest, you should leave and pick a different memorial place to continue.
4) Means of Orientation
Like maps of the place. Even a cellphone camera could come in handy. If you go to a big place, like a necropolis, a camera is a great help. You can take pictures of points of reference. In time your memories and pictures will help you create a mental map of the place.
You may find a certain neighborhood in which symbol activity is higher than others. It’s good to have the means to mark the place to find it later. Also, it may sound overkill but a compass may come in handy, if the place is too big.
5) Perseverance
Another thing that you’ll need. Please don’t give up if you get the other side of the coin. I mean, if the signs you find early in your journey either annoy you or downright scare you. This is a possibility and in my case, the bad signs came in a large amount. Still, I couldn’t let them pass. Also, you might not find anything to write home about at first, but I wager that sooner or later you’ll find some of the especial signs, and you’ll know what I mean whan I say some aren’t fit to let them pass.
The Method
Go to the graveyard of your choice and walk by the streets where you can read the epitaphs and name plaques directly while walking.
Walk constantly, but at a relaxed pace that allows you to read one name after another in a constant, non-forced, succession.
As soon as you come upon a name that resonates with you, reminds you of anything, or tells you something (be it personal or not), stop. I called this initial attention-grabber the IAN, for Initial Attracting Name.
Now you have to check the LR and RR. The Left Reinforcer and the Right Reinforcer.
To do it, 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 that, to you, means something greater than the sum of the three parts.
Sometimes I found strange concatenations. These sets didn’t follow the most common rule of the two extremes and the center of a file of five tombs, crypts, or vaults.
These strange concatenations were sets where maybe four out of the five headstones or crypts configuring a group, made sense.
Sometimes I’ve found clusters of more than the standard set of three-five, all either related to each other, in my interpretation, or making up parts of a unified sign. These were strings of symbols that went beyond the LR, or the RR, or both.
Enjoy a Real Page-Turner
I’ll continue adding buying channels for the books to those I chose, but that has a reason. That’s because I want you to read it. It doesn’t matter if you read one, two, or the whole series.
I need you to read at least one whole volume, and see for yourself how the content matches the subject matter, and the style matches the other two elements. And how this combination makes for a very particular poetic journey, that hasn’t been tried up to now.
Buy it in Your Favorite eBook Portal
I have made this collection available in three of the major eBook outlets on the web:
- Amazon Kindle
- Smashwords
- Lulu.com
Click here for a complete list of eBook outlets where you can buy The Matrix of Death.
If you don’t have accounts on those sites and don’t care to create one, then you can buy it directly from me using any of these payment processors
- PayPal
- Skrill
- Neteller
Click here for an overview of the process to buy it directly from me.
Get the Typeset Version
I admit, when typesetting my style steals a lot from Victorian-era publishing, but it is old stuff and in the public domain, so why not use it, right? With that off my chest, let me tell you that the typeset versions and the ebook portal versions are oranges and apples in how they look.
If you decide to buy it directly from me I’ll send you the typeset versions, something that’s not possible with the other eBook formats.
The typeset versions (PDF, MOBI, EPUB), certainly look better than the plain ebook formats.
I guarantee you that when you read The Matrix of Death, you will have a great time. If you’re new to poetry, reading this collection early on will be a great benefit to you.
After you read it, you’ll have added to your poetic experience a contemporary work informed strictly by the past. And what’s more dead than the past, right?
I managed the poems in this collection to the best of my abilities when putting each volume of The Matrix of Death together.
When I had already written all the poems but hadn’t decided yet how I will arrange the series, there were a lot of options to make it stylistically sound.
To sort them randomly was totally off the picture from the start. I could have grouped them by either, poem form, chronologically, corporal expressions, stimulus, theme, transitory states, consequents, permanent states, subject matter, or theme.
It didn’t take me long to find out the option that I saw as most valuable in the artistic sense, which was the traditional ancient way, grouping them by permanent state.
I can’t remember now if I used all of those components of each poem to further sort them when I had already grouped them by permanent state.
In the poem’s final ordering is plain to see that more general components like the themes and subject matter took over after the initial grouping.
About Me
I have been writing poetry since my late teens. I'm a very lonely guy. Small-time photographer since 2013. Taphophile since late-2003. Poet for a quarter century.
I did all the work to create and publish my series of death poetry, The Matrix of Death. My spiritual pedrigee empowered me to write cosmic-grade poetry.
The poetry saga The Matrix Of Death was slated to be released in mid-December of 2012. I finished writing the poems for the books somewhere around mid-2011.
I began to work on the books in late November 2011, and the task was so daunting, that I decided to give up and forget about it. It took me almost half a decade to figure out how to go about self publishing without having to depend in third-parties for any of the different tasks of the process.
It’s a steep, upward path, and it can be painful for those who live in the right side of the brain like me. In my case it wasn’t a lack of education or intelligence of my part, but it was a matter of having to deal with useless, superficial software that didn’t do the job correctly.
The waters are divided between judging a book by its cover, or not caring about it, but I think that if the content is awesome, the cover should reflect that awesomeness, and the worst blunder I encountered was having all the books already designed but the documents were in a state that prevented me from doing a professional cover.
With the poor excuse of a software I used (Scribus), I couldn’t import a cover, I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I remember that the documents came to a point of bloat that was such, that the program just won’t do the expected procedures and I had to design the cover with Scribus’ limited drawing tools, the result was pathetic and considering myself unpresentable, I gave up, and quit poetry altogether.
Someday I’ll go out of poetic retirement, and that will be to publish in print, through my own publishing house. For now there is a lot of poets and writers I’m interested in reading and sharing with those that for a reason or another came in search of death oriented poetry.
Self Publishing
The most important thing I’d recommend to those starting, or who want to start, in the path of self-publishing, and not rely on anyone for all the work involved is to be in the search of the ultimate blending between the Internet and the subject matter of the books in question. The book and author’s site, the advertising campaigns and the author’s presence on the Internet must match the subject, it goes without saying.
I advice you to take several years before committing to it. It’s hard work and you don’t want to be doing it for something of which you’ll be ashamed later, like it happened to me during the Scribus debacle.
It’s very easy to fall for shoddy diversions when one’s starting out. And that’s what happened to me not only with the tools for crafting the book I chose, but also with the book’s site. I don’t want to go into any kind of technical detail, but it was mostly a problem with I being broke and having to rely on shoddy free web hosting, while at the same time not being satisfied with what I could achieve with my basic web mastering skills.
I’ve been designing and inter-networking for The Matrix Of Death for hundreds of hours.
I’ve lost hundreds of hours with the back end of things, and for me it boils down to this: either take your time and a course or two and exchange a normal life for some serious effort, or outsource everything except your most basic content, and be prepared to either put considerable money or possibly to fall prey to the sad but true rule of the ‘what you get is what you paid for’.
Image Credits
whole attribution is in the metadata of each image
AK Rockefeller
826 Paranormal
Lex Taylor
