Iron Man by Adam Matthews XXL Magazine

When he answers the door, the first thing you notice is his hair. It's short and stringy, much straighter than in his halcyon days when he sported a healthy head of baby dreds. He wears a standard issue baby blue shiny T-shirt, shiny black jeans and a pair of And1's. Gravediggaz MC Anthony "Poetic" Berkeley is obviously sick, but staring at him and speaking with him, it's easy to forget. He seems so alive that when he rhymes about his condition, even he sounds surprised: "Four years out of seven I remember touring/This year I'm measuring my urine."

"About a year and a half ago I was diagnosed with edema carcinoma, which is cancer of the colon," he says, seated in his home studio in Bloomfield, New Jersey. "It came as a surprise and a shock to me, especially when doctors are telling me I only had three months to live. All my family was around me. The doctors were just prepping them, getting them to accept that I was going to be off the planet for a minute."

Then he puts on a brave face. "But, I don't think so!" decrees the thirty-five-year-old. "I didn't feel it was my time. I closed my eyes and said, could I imagine myself getting old? And the answer was yes."
Poetic had experienced his share of setbacks before this. He had been homeless, dropped from his label and generally underrated as an artist. Finally in 1994, the Gravediggaz arrived, introducing the world to horrorcore. Former Stetsasonic DJ Prince Paul assembled Stet member Fruitkwan, the erstwhile Prince Rakeem, now known as the RZA, and little-known Poetic to create a supergroup. (They'd each been previously signed to Tommy Boy.)

Stetsasonic, hip-hop's “first” live band, was instrumental in the label's history; Prince Rakeem released a rather commercial debut single in 1991 and was quickly dropped; and Poetic, as one-half of Too Poetic, had released a single in 1989 but lost his deal before their debut album was released. The Gravediggaz signed a deal with Gee Street and released a brilliant conceptual debut in 1995, Six Feet Deep, which is certified gold. The brainchild of Prince Paul, Six Feet Deep mocked hip-hop's obsession with violence by presenting the MCs in over-the-top slasher-pic roles such as Grym Reaper (Poetic), the Gatekeeper (Fruitkwan) and the Rzarector (RZA).

But things quickly went south. The RZA lost interest in the Gravediggaz when his real love, the Wu-Tang Clan, blew up. The Diggaz's second album, 1997's The Pick, The Shovel and The Sickle, featured less of the RZA and Prince Paul, but the album's cover featured RZA much more prominently than the other members. According to Poetic, the RZA was only convinced to do the second album when Gee Street allowed his production company to control the project. Still, the album evoked the Wu's dirty, insistent sound—plus their trademark biblical speak—and RZA shone the spotlight to his latest acolytes, Tru Master, Goldfinghaz and 4th Disciple. "Babylon is never penalized for being offside/So many lost lives," Poetic shot off on the meandering "The Day The Earth Cried.” Not long after, the foursome was reduced to Fruitkwan and Poetic.

Soon after beginning work on their third album in April 1999, Poetic collapsed in his home studio. When doctor's first told him he had cancer, Poetic was convinced he could beat it on his own. He refused chemotherapy and embarked on a diet of herbs and fresh juice.

"When he first came to see me he was scared about taking treatment," remembers his physician, Dr. Nancy Kemeny, a colon cancer specialist who teaches at Cornell Medical School. Poetic's girlfriend Dee Dee Hill, who'd been studying herbology in California, moved to New York to be with him. They planned to move to Georgia together, but the cancer spread from his colon to his lungs and he needed to stay close to Manhattan's renowned Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

The next time Poetic arrived at the hospital, he was gaunt, pale and confined to a wheelchair. He was ready for chemotherapy. "You can't imagine what he looked like," Kemeny says. Members of her support staff even asked her, "Why are you treating him? He's dying." But Kemeny persisted and Poetic's health has markedly improved, but he still has to deal with nausea and diarrhea, because chemotherapy attacks healthy cells as well as cancerous one. "It's toxic," he says of the treatment. "I'm talking about throwing up for four days straight. Almost every week."

Compared to being bed-ridden and pumped full of Demerol and morphine, Poetic can deal with his current condition. "One morphine pill would last 12 hours," he recalls. "[I would] take two pills a day. I started hallucinating off of that shit; getting up thinking I'm on fire, thinking I'm going to different planets every night. It got crazy. I took myself off of that. At the time, I started smoking weed."

"That was killing me," he says, emphasizing his words. He realized to get better he needed to get back to the music. As soon as he was able to, he and Fruitkwan completed the Gravediggaz album, which they had begun before he got sick. "I was put on this earth for a reason," he says, "and my reason is hip-hop. My reason is lyrics, the intelligence of the lyrics, and the consciousness of the lyrics. Even sometimes, the flamboyance of it."

Sixteen months after he was diagnosed and thirteen months after he was supposed to be dead, Poetic is proudly playing some new Gravediggaz tracks at his New Jersey home. He's sitting in his abbreviated home studio, a converted parlor in the small, tidy apartment he shares with Dee Dee Hill. His life is on hold, most of his equipment is in storage, and there's a good chance that he might never to get to use all of the sequencers, drum machines and effects processors he's bought for his personal lab. He moved from Bay Shore, Long Island a month ago, after tiring of the four-hour, round-trip commutes to receive chemotherapy at Sloan-Kettering.

The new songs sound vital, but are absent of RZA's marble-mouthed vocals, Prince Paul's whimsical production, and Gee Street's clout. All that is left are the beats and voices of Fruitkwan and Poetic, two MCs well past 30, who still sound hungry. As "False Things Must Perish," a driving, fire-and-brimstone ode featuring Prodigal Sonn and produced by Poetic, plays in the background, the MC gets up and rhymes along, his eyes burning.

Positive thinking, he says, has fueled his recovery. "Intestinal fortitude, that's just not taking it, even when you get the worst news possible. You still stay optimistic and say, 'Yo, I can beat this.' Instead of, 'Aw, damn, I'm going to die.' 'Cause when you tell yourself that you're going to die, that's what usually happens. That's the power of our own minds, the power of our own words. I'm a lyricist, so I know about the power of words."

He has also had to face the power of deeds. In July 1999, Fruitkwan and Prince Paul attended a benefit for Poetic at a now-defunct Manhattan nightclub, Tramps. "He bought me a Prince Among Thieves cassette and T-shirt, and a Black Tail magazine," Poetic says of Prince Paul. "That lifted my [spirits]." The two have also visited him in the hospital.

Fruitkwan has accompanied Poetic in ambulances, visited him at home and screamed on anyone who's dared to smoke near him. "He took me under his wing like a little brother" Poetic says. "He's very protective of me." Support has come from unlikely people such as Warren G., who offered music and money, and young fans who have mailed him $5 and $10 checks.

But RZA has yet to write, call or visit his former bandmate. Poetic is slow to criticize RZA, using a vague analogy about a snake being a snake, while hinting at his anger. When he finally speaks his mind, he speaks in decidedly un-hip-hop terms. "I'm just very disappointed, in a number of aspects," he says. "I'm very, very disappointed in RZA, to the point of hurtfulness. I'm really hurt." (Through his publicist, RZA offered no comment for this story.)

Poetic nevertheless manages to avoid feeling sorry for himself. In fact, he never really gives one the sense that he's dying at all. When he speaks about his brother Brainstorm—"He's nice, he's going to be on my solo album"—he makes it sound like a solo album is a done deal. The 17-cut third Gravediggaz album will be released, he says, and Rawkus is interested. "I'm talking about passing the mantle on," he says. “We ain't got to do it 15 or 20 more years. But I could."

His doctor feels otherwise. Statistically, his chances are "rather negative," Kemeny says. "The majority of people do not survive. The median survival of someone with his condition is 12 months." In that sense, Poetic has already beat the odds. But he has an almost unbearable financial situation as well: He has no health insurance, and has burned through his savings. His biweekly chemo treatments cost $2,500, and he also has to pay for medicine and doctor's visits. He is already close to $100, 000 in debt and that figure will continue to grow.

But none of this seems to deter Poetic from making music; it's what he lives for. He plans to release his solo album under the moniker Tony Titanium, a reference to the titanium valve in his chest through which he receives his chemo. The chorus to the track speaks volumes about his current state of mind: "Tony Titanium rock till my career close," he intones over the ghoulish self-produced track. And in Anthony Berkeley's mind, that time will only come when he's ready.