The Proximate Nephew is a ribald poetic form intended to express grief over immortality, originating in The Zombie of Swarming. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is a single sexain. Use of assonance is characteristic of the form. A form of parallelism is common throughout the poem, in that certain lines often share an underlying meaning. Each line has five syllables. The sixth line of the sexain has the same grammatical structure as the fourth line.