To Love the Unlovable — Written Inside Prison

To love the unlovable—
that has always been my way.
A game whose rules are never spoken:
I keep entering the same experience
and seeing what others cannot,
or will not.

I go into the most hated
the marginalized, the discarded,
the incarcerated, the unfed
and turn it into the most high
I go into the mind-ghettos
and lift the jewels out of the dung heap,
and hold them up
until the world feels the ache
of what it kept from itself.

The process is always the same:
Enter. Draw in the hate.
Go to the bottom, where the sacred is,
and resurrect it.
The work is to re-sacralize
what the world left for dead.

Those who take the cruise die before their grave.
But those who choose to go all the way down,
buried alive,
learn the joke about falling through the sky:
there is no ground.
And only where there is no ground
does anyone learn to fly.

And then the laughing—
that this, and these, are mine
to tend to, but most of all
to laugh with,
at the great cosmic play
we thrust ourselves into as light.
How marvelous it all is.

If you want power that is real,
you will not find it insulated,
packaged in brands and titles.
You find it where there is nothing left to lose—
the kind that erupts and boils.
And you find it in here.

If you choose this adventure,
they will tell you that you are crazy.
And maybe you are.
But here in the madhouse,
made crazy by the pull of the moon
they are sensitive enough to feel,
I can tell you this:
the crazy ones
are our only hope of sanity.

This poem was meant to be the first chapter of Ride or Fly. Nicole took it out of the book — the only place to read it is here.