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.
I turn to Willa Cather’s quote: Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
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.
So much of control is not authoritative action but mindful waiting.
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.
Fights begin and end with handshakes.
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.
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.
I didn’t want anybody seeing my fire until I burned them with it.
How can I stand before you in silent symbols with open palms?
...real childhood scars heal, but not when band-aids replace self-reflection.
The more inhuman we became the more we understood each other as humans.
If pain is a pot of boiling water, humor can be the rising steam.
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.
We were of thirteen minds, like a tree, in which there is one Red-tail and eleven squirrel parts.
To live meant feeding my former self to my current self.
A poet could kill the dead.
A counter to a jab is a left hook. What’s the counter to prejudice?
In other words, I tasted a different drug. A drug called progress.
