Cameron Conaway

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

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

“Unreality cooled reality’s burn.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“A poet could kill the dead.”

“The ribboned gallons that rule us like beliefs rooted in single experiences.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“Fights begin and end with handshakes.”

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

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

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

“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.”