Author’s Note :
These poems were derived from the closed captioning of an interview with UFC fighter Conor McGregor. The technology’s inability to account for McGregor’s Dublin accent resulted in a glitch-laden and often garbled transcription. I collected, arranged, and lightly edited this found text.
While loosely following the structure of the spoken language, the glitches reveal a suggestive layer within the speech that invokes and recasts the discourse surrounding self-promotion and combat sports. This sunken language is absurd yet resonant—a poetics of both failure and revelation.
O Theoretical Island Let’s say: anomaly, immense. Over the disk, field or lye. I have to finish one before many. Things are coming: a mountain of hunger. You arrive in snow as in the moment. Fog afflict, live mist not so like your boat. How you Aleppo somebody last summer for real, the famous USA. Outside your payment life support to windows, you were a secure sea world. O Sugar Party Renewal is over and beyond for a long time. Vast in the distant, we know what. Join them in black market: you, him, to that. We have crazy given, your shadows. White, two hours of images on young people. And why? Mouth it very much with my shit. Rather time. Asparagus so pushing, red pepper black carry example. Shun your belt, and together with it, a folder already there. O Thesis Rose What your heavy gentleman himself, all this linguist due to disappear. Give him just the list, took mobile and to economical week in you. An orderly and would the sludge, her baby mark leper. Experience needed. I got to be the charm and you in thirteen chins. Towards approach millions, sense of humor, havoc. My team led cabernet groping USA. Business whimper politics reading; men simply is less on this. All wilderness, the pianist with it, in it. Detect solo, whitest boring with his old eye is a watch. Doors to good food and a party, new body, so predictable. He just blesses; he sees your own. Much is brain can also water when I go with itself, increasingly. Lay inside me, the sign said. In the archive. It’s like a poor fashion, survival.
Bio: Andrew Rihn is the author of Revelation: An Apocalypse in Fifty-Eight Fights, a book of prose poems about Mike Tyson. He lives in Ohio, USA.
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