Daily Haiku, Oct 1, 2026

The poem sets up its own trap. Those first two lines coast on the most familiar comfort cliché in the language, the kind of line you'd stitch on a pillow, and the poem knows it, lets you settle into that warmth before pulling the floor out. Then the final line lands with the deadpan timing of a joke you see coming half a second too late, and the whole piece flips from sincere to wry without changing its tone of voice at all. That's the craft here: no punctuation shift, no exclamation, just a quiet question that recontextualizes everything before it. The tunnel image stays literal and metaphorical at once, which is what makes the reversal work rather than feeling like a cheap gotcha. There's no season or weather to speak of, just the hum of a cliché being gently mocked and reinhabited. Reread it and the first two lines sound different, already a little nervous, as if some part of the speaker suspected the train all along.