Cameron Conaway

“Like forearm veins, my interests spread in different directions and eventually led to the hands, to writing.”

“I’ve learned to fall like the BJJ player, to protect the body through controlling the distribution of force by slapping the mat with hands open. With hands open. Hands open. Open. O Pen.”

“My next fight would not be measured in rounds, but throughout a lifetime. It would sustain and fulfill me longer than anything in the cage could. My opponent, my fight, would be against the slipping aspects of American society.”

“Fights begin and end with handshakes.”

“Don’t settle, but settle.”

“The historic beauty of BJJ rests not with its ability to allow a smaller man to maim a larger man, but with its ability to allow any man of any size to survive.”

“The more inhuman we became the more we understood each other as humans.”

“The storm before the calm.”

“It was evening and would be when I woke. No matter. From the maple tree the Red-tail spoke.”

“We were of thirteen minds, like a tree, in which there is one Red-tail and eleven squirrel parts.”

“A counter to a jab is a left hook. What’s the counter to prejudice?”

“I didn’t want anybody seeing my fire until I burned them with it.”

“Stories do not change, only the lives they live in do.”

“Giving up is always an option, but not always a failure.”

“Ultimate vulnerability. That’s manly.”

“In other words, I tasted a different drug. A drug called progress.”

“I should no longer define myself as the son of a father who couldn’t or hasn’t or wouldn’t or wasn’t.”

“...real childhood scars heal, but not when band-aids replace self-reflection.”

“It’s cool when fashion recycles itself, it’s not cool when sustainable living does because it means there was (and is as I write) a period of absolute and possibly irreversible destruction.”

“It’s too bad war gets all the attention; it’s too bad the plant is easier to see than the root.”

“We give up our backs and allow religious myths to apply the rear naked choke to our minds.”

“The words he said, too, must be human enough to bleed.”

“Fighting and writing’s deepest layers of beauty lie not only in the physical and mental realms of what we know, but also as an incognizable instinct, a realm we will never fully know but will forever feel.”

“Poets, like fighters, both reap the benefits of roadwork.”

“In The Land of Poetry and Fighting, Efficiency rules the throne. I try to live here, so I shave my head because hair is dead and dead is inefficient.”

“How can I stand before you in silent symbols with open palms?”

“To live meant feeding my former self to my current self.”

“So much of control is not authoritative action but mindful waiting.”

“Unreality cooled reality’s burn.”

“A poet could kill the dead.”

“If pain is a pot of boiling water, humor can be the rising steam.”