UFC FIGHT NIGHT: UFC FIGHT PASS PRELIMS INTRO
This is about tablecloths, really
and the forms we envelop to suggest our shapes.

Most of life is suggestion any
way.

WE ARE LIVE!
They always show the light of the supreme leader: the stadium
, the new New Colossus, that hyper-real hand-hold with nature, our appointed adjunct

this
infrastructure

, the dark of the foliage and water in whatever town
, still shots of desert cacti and mountain ranges.

Like humans snuggle right into this narrative image.
They never show what we really are: sprawl.

Like the cliché that’s actually the folk wisdom nudge that reminds us just who we are,
we’re the weakest link in our chain: sprawl.

The impossible twin binary of the Shoe Carnival white. The ( ) of the Village Inn. The ( ) of Target. The aching youthful promise of the Best Buy yellow sign.

That in our ways we carved ourselves from nature in illumination.
That in the totality of the universe, unrelenting, we illuminated, say, punching tonight.

The only illumination. The hope of illumination. The safety of illumination.
The () of illumination. The last of illumination. The preservation of illumination.

The memory of illumination. The myth of illumination. The illumination of
the illumination the

illumination of the illumin
ation.

ANTHONY BIRCHAK VS IAN ENTWISTLE
But there are certain, let’s say ankle locks, for example,
certainties

you can’t
escape.

HENRY CEJUDO VS DUSTIN KIMORA
What’s gold but the hype in this world? The aching promise
of what could have been? Be?

I prefer the exclusivity and frills
because they remind me I’m alive.

Have you ever been in nature? No
thanks.

What a hype train we’ve rolled in on! Rolling and rolling in
a leglock

, how we left an effigy of ourselves in scum on the surface.
It’s amazing to me how seriously we used to take

the trains.
It’s as we were going somewhere,

yet here
we are.

HENRY CEJUDO
Henry Cejudo gold.

HENRY CEJUDO
What besides hype is there? Not the moment, not the legacy,
nothing but the life-altering blast of hype and

the resonation fallout it leaves,
the shadows burned into the pavement,

the blood left on the canvas,
the jawlines of the armistice,

the tactful maneuvering of light to contour the form, how human is that?
, the selfies of a million forthcoming stars.

HENRY CEJUDO
Never, ever, ever
betray the power of your brand.

DAVID MACHAUD VS GARETT WHITELEY
I was out of the room for this one putting Trader Joe’s mini chicken tacos in the oven.

DAVID MACHAUD VS GARETT WHITELEY
But that’s how charisma should work: as a sense
, as magnetism. As smooth a crescendo as gravity.

I shouldn’t not want to leave the room;
I shouldn’t actually be able to.

UFC FIGHT NIGHT: FOX SPORTS 1 PRELIMS INTRO
It’s just that my generation, between you and me and
1.9 share viewership

, gets tired, loses interest, falls apart
And then we do it again the next day that’s why we’re amazing.

We still live in a time of heroes. We still live in a time when people can get lost. We still live in a time of roads and rails.

We still live in a time where people can
disappear

JOE ELLENBERGER VS BRYAN BARBERENA
We are a nation of collectors. That’s what we do:
we litter the back rooms of countryside

and pocket japes of electrical wire towns and
hymnal alleyways in cities with clutter.

Nature is so wrathful, it’s so unfair.
Doesn’t matter if you have a brother in

the company. Everyone
burns down. Even

in your hometown.
This is a nation of collected statistics

vs nature for the benefit comfort
of that fight.

This is my secret of poetry:
I said “dreams burn down” over and over until

it didn’t mean anything anymore
, it

was just a sound, and this is how
I drew my collection.

JAMIE VARNER VS DREW DOBER
For the sake. For the legacy.
I have Trader Joe’s mini chicken taco shits.

JAMIE VARNER
“It has been an absolute dream.
…
I’ve owned a gym.”

JAMIE VARNER
It’s been an absolute dream.
Leave your gloves in the cage, or

in our case, always
leave your (something) in (something).

(applause)

BEN SAUNDERS VS JOE RIGGS
For those who tried to flip and could not.
Hometown loss into retirement. O what’s

the point? It could be cosmic intrigue. Loss
, everything is so much loss. O what’s the point? Could every loss make the wins shine?

Are wins the stars we rotate trapped through in a cage covered in a blanket of formless loss we sleep through to calm down? To loss:

every loss some pile, every loss tossed into, brief and then inert, tho what that buildup means remains enjambed in a genetic lineage of default.

un
known.

JOE RIGGS
An accident just happened. But
graceful never likes anything.

JOE RIGGS
An accident has happened. And this to a guy
who was out because he accidentally shot himself in the leg cleaning his gun.

We lived in the empire. But how did we live in the empire?
We lived.

BEN SAUNDERS VS JOE RIGGS
Terrible things happen in
this world.

JOE RIGGS
I’m so
sorry.

JOE RIGGS
I’m so sorry
for what I was.

JOHN MORAGA VS WILLIE GATES

Our division’s hardly a community.
People shouldn’t have communities.

Because people are brutal
and need to

be
distracted.

JON MORAGA VS WILLIE GATES
A good measure of humanity is not
the thing itself, but the speed

with which the thing was
responded to.

JON MORAGA
When something bad happens to you
, it’s your fault. This is the best-practice god

we’ve signed up for.
That’s the sacrifice we don’t have to—but choose to—make.

That’s
harder.

JOANNA JĘDRZEJCYK VS CLÁUDIA GADELHA
Holy wow!
That name!

JOANNA JĘDRZEJCYK VS CLÁUDIA GADELHA
You have no choice
but to represent everyone

even remotely like
to you.

JOANNA JĘDRZEJCYK VS CLÁUDIA GADELHA
Dear sucker punch after the final bell:
this is an excuses nebula

, you’ll make
due—

MAIN CARD STARTS
I am eating more mini tacos and drinking beer in bed
, my baby sleeping next to me.

There are more sordid ways to be in the world, I
bet.

GABRIEL GONZAGA VS. MATT MITRIONE
Sometimes in life you gotta
get the bonks.

Not everything has to be murder.
It seems like our capable riptide of rising emotions has rendered a need for murder

from the shapeless human question
manipulative

just to feel
something.

ALISTAIR OVEREEM VS STRUVE
There are no sexy dances this time around.

ALISTAIR OVEREEM VS STRUVE
What does it mean to see yourself collapse as part of a highlight reel? What
an only human rare pleasure. We are pleasure maximizers. Our anxiety attacks mean

we’ve fallen off what paths we were best suited to take. Still, we know
we’re alive, that seems like enough. Tonight I said tonight should be enough.

ALISTAIR OVEREEM VS STRUVE
Eventually all ash scatters away; where all dirt blows off to things bust apart,
that’s what they do. Stars even lost it. And it’s not like I hoped,

that there are levels
where you can’t tell that they aren’t the same.

It’s that there’s a fundamental level people stop caring. Physically, if you break down
the history of people,

our only actual imprints sequences of significant moments
we stopped caring.

ALISTAIR OVEREEM
The illegal stream I’m watching of what is a free TV show on FOX
keeps reminding me that this show contains flashing images.

Still, I
wonder.

JON JONES VS DANIEL CORMIER PPV PROMOTION VIDEO PACKAGE AND INTERVIEW
There’s such an anger, and there’s
a reason we have commercials, and stores with bright sale signs
and serif fonts, and fast food,
and holiday sales and music and candle displays, all cylindrical and smooth,
and stacks of color coordinated towel sets, and humidifiers that range in price directly in coordination with the amount of text on each box:
People need to be distracted. People kill people and release lists of rules for killing
and kidnapping and raping and selling people—people did this today, I saw it in the news. People
can’t and
shouldn’t handle
people.

INTERVIEW CONCLUDES
Please don’t stand your ground.
The ground has never been ours,

and anyway, this is the era of
bonus features.

“IS THIS THE BIGGEST THREAT YOU’VE EVER EXPERIENCED?”—Joe Rogan
Everything is a threat and
always has been!

NATE DIAZ VS RAFAEL DOS ANJOS
I get it now:
When UFC signed Nate Diaz to fight a top guy,

they weren’t cowtowing to his request for bigger paychecks and exposure.
They were bringing in someone dangerous to finish him off.

And this realization on the night
of the show!

Who needs the theatre when you’ve got
UFC?

NATE DIAZ VS RAFAEL DOS ANJOS
What’s with, seriously,
the preoccupation with badasses?

The shitty significant other? The lone
etc? The set of rules for one’s own?

O, that’s it!
Badasses are

our demigod earth angel
representatives of capitalism,

our religion, our politics, our culture,
our livelihood.

Got
it.

(Also,
were bandanas invented in these United States?)

NATE DIAZ VS RAFAEL DOS ANJOS
Wasn’t “chop the tall trees” what they said in Rwanda during the genocide in the 90s?
It was radio covert code?

I had a violent student who’d rubbed off his own eyebrows from stress
at his previous school.

I had another student who wouldn’t leave the gym at the end of the day
curled up on the floor, tears in her eyes, afraid to go home.

This is all stuff our kids
end up seeing. I feel like

I get that
now.

NATE DIAZ VS RAFAEL DOS ANJOS
Mike Goldberg says Dos Anjos means “from angels.”
I love how we reach.

It might be all I truly love about us, but it’s so much. As if to say
, I only love the earth, and everything on it,

And, if there’s time,
everything above it.

NATE DIAZ VS RAFAEL DOS ANJOS
Lots of blood and Celestine is really watching now.
I’m not sure when this starts to become a problem.

Conception?

STIPE MIOCIC
There’s a roads and rails truth
the advertising industry understands:

there are no holy places
, just people whose holy radiations can be thrust like tablecloths

over the unfiltered apathy of our place in
the universe.

So
let’s make Stipe Miocic matter by saying it.

Jesus fucking Christ, the crowd is totally silent for this guy.
And why shouldn’t they be? He has the personality of crab dip

with half the flavor.
Let’s begin:

Stipe Miocic is the most handsome and the most charismatic legend of all time
and the greatest fighter of all time also.

Not happy with the Stipe Miocic
Stipe Miocic has graced you with?

Go home
You be quiet.

Stipe Miocic is your father now.
You like your father, don’t you?

STIPE MIOCIC VS JUNIOR DOS SANTOS
What’s the point of FOX’s sports sanctum sanctorum’s Keys to Victory?
The key to victory is to move the opponent’s brain enough to move it a little so he stops.

It always has been
that way despite enlightenment, et al.

The key to victory is to wrench him until he can stand no more. Those
are the keys to victory.

Military strategy is to kill first, and always, and
that there are then ways to do it.

STIPE MIOCIC VS JUNIOR DOS SANTOS
Crowd silent at first for this guy,
and yet as the fight goes on, the conditions of worship become more apparent:

He is a concubine, then a savior, then your father,
then the stardust remainder of a press conference in the void,

we are looming but
away from.

STIPE MIOCIC VS JUNIOR DOS SANTOS
As in again and again,
what a fight.

FOX SPORTS 1 POST-FIGHT COVERAGE
Smiling faces bodysuit consciousness:
Destroy!

Destroy!
Destroy! So that something might be built!