Daily Haiku — Jul 4, 2026

This one earns its laugh by playing it straight until the last possible second. The first two lines borrow one of the oldest comfort-phrases we have — that hopeful cliché about light at the end of the tunnel — and deliver it with total sincerity, even a little grandeur in "awaits." Then the turn: five syllables that yank the rug out. It's not fate or relief, it's a train, and suddenly the metaphor becomes literal in the worst way.

What makes it land is restraint. No exclamation point, no punchline mugging — just "wait is that a train," flat and almost polite, like someone noticing too late. The internal echo of "wait" against "awaits" is the quiet trick holding it together, a rhyme disguised as hesitation. There's no season here, no weather — the mood is pure comic dread, the tunnel doing double duty as both cliché and actual hazard. Small poem, big flinch.