Juniper Crab Apple

Is

There

Such a

Thing

As

A

Bad Poem?

Beauty's Beholders

Whatever floats

Your motorboats

I’ve seen this same sun rise, Thousands of times, The same horizon, The same story, The similarity, the sundering -

Come empty

And

After I’ve seen that same sun set, Thousands of times, I settle in beds, eventually broken, Into dreams, eventually torn, Onto long walks, going nowhere -

In longing for that same sun

To

Rise

Again,

No matter how dark the skies arrive to greet.

I left my house that morning

as one leaves a grave they have grown used to.

My bones were tired of carrying my name.

Even the mirror had begun to look at me

with the pity of an old god

who has forgotten the language of miracles.

The streets were still half asleep.

Dust floated like abandoned prayers.

And I walked slowly as if every step

required the permission of a reluctant universe.

Inside my chest lived a courtroom of ghosts.

They spoke with the voices of teachers,

of parents, of silent cities

that had watched me grow crooked

like a wounded tree.

You are unworthy, they said.

You are a house built on unfinished dreams.

You are a failure no one bothered to mourn.

And I believed them

the way prophets believe in storms.

So I walked like a defeated soldier

returning from a war no one remembers.

The sky above me was the pale blue of an ancient myth.

I remembered how Icarus once loved the sun too much

and how the sea punished him for it.

I remembered how Sisyphus wakes each morning

with a stone heavier than yesterday.

Perhaps, I thought,

I am the child of their despair,

a sibling to those condemned

to repeat the same sorrow in different centuries.

The sunrose quietly over the rooftops.

It did not ask who I was.

It did not ask what I had failed to become.

It touched the world

as if everything deserved forgiveness.

The windows caught fire with gold.

The trees began whispering in green.

Even the pigeons carried small pieces

of dawn inside their wings.

And suddenly the earth looked less like a courtroom

and more like a garden

that had been waiting patiently for my arrival.

The sun placed its warm hand on my tired face.

And for the first time in many winters my heart

remembered its ancient language.

It says to me: Live.

Live like the rivers

that refuse to apologize for carving the mountains.

Live like the olive trees of forgotten villages

that survive wars simply by believing in tomorrow.

Live because the sun does not rise for the perfect.

It rises for the broken,

the doubtful,

the wandering children of sorrow.

It rises even for those who believe they do not deserve it.

I stood there in the quiet revolution of morning.

And the ghosts inside my chest fell silent.

Somewhere in the distance a child laughed.

Somewhere a window opened.

And in that fragile, golden moment I realized

something the philosophers forgot to write:

Even the most exhausted soul

is only one sunrise away

some kind of sketch-doodle-artwork of bayonetta i've been picking at since 2024, i don't know anymore what i was trying to accomplish with it

Johnnie Johnson