#groundhogday
There is a morning that refuses to end.
Something I’ve been trying to understand,
Something that doesn’t quite make sense until it does.
I was happy with you.
Not in a fleeting way,
Not something I could easily replace,
But something that settled into me quietly.
You felt like home.
And in that home, I found a version of myself that knew how to be happy.
Not loudly. Not temporarily.
You settled into me slowly,
like warmth returning to frozen hands,
like finding home after wandering too long
through rooms where the sound of your heart only matters
But then I saw you with them.
And I tried to deny it at first.
I tried to believe that what we had was enough.
But the truth was there, clear and undeniable.
You were happier.
Not just a little, not just in passing, but in a way that lit you up completely. The kind of happiness I had never been able to give you.
You looked lighter beside them.
Like laughter came easier.
Like the universe had finally placed you where you were always supposed to be.
And I understood something terrible,
Love does not always ask to be chosen.
Sometimes it only asks to witness.
And that was the moment everything changed.
Because in choosing your happiness, I had to let go of mine.
I didn’t just lose you.
I lost the only place where my happiness knew how to exist.
The days after felt unfamiliar.
Quiet in the wrong ways.
Heavy in places that used to feel full.
It was like learning how to live without something I had already built my world around.
Like carrying a life that no longer carried me back.
And yet, even in that emptiness, something remains.
A loophole.
Because as much as I have lost my own happiness,
As much as I am still trying to find where I belong without you,
I cannot separate myself from the way I love you.
And the way I love you has always meant this---
That your happiness matters more than mine ever did.
So when I see you now,
When I see you smiling the way you do with them,
When I see you living in the kind of joy I could never give,
Something in me still responds.
It hurts. It really does.
Like reopening a wound
that healed incorrectly.
But it is also the only proof
that some part of me remains alive.
And maybe that is the punishment.
Not that I lost you,
But that every new day forces me to survive you again,
While still loving you enough to be grateful
that you found the happiness
I could not become.
But at the same time, it gives me something to hold onto.
Because if I can no longer be happy for myself,
I can still be happy for you.
The quiet, unbearable comfort
of knowing that as long as you are happy,
a fragment of me is too.
And maybe that is the cruelest, most beautiful part of all.
That even after losing you, even after losing the happiness I once had, I am not left with nothing.
I am left with that loophole.
The quiet, aching truth that as long as you are happy,
a part of me still is too.
Not whole.
Not the way it used to be.
Not enough to escape this loop.
Not enough to call it healing.
But enough to wake up again.
Enough to keep going.
May 10
May 10, 2026 at 12:29 PM UTC
The past does not fade,
it waits, silent,
like a shadow clinging to the edges of my skin,
a ghost that never stops whispering.
I open my eyes in the present,
and there it is again,
the same ache,
the same weight,
wearing a different face,
but cutting me with the same sharp edges.
It is not the same, I tell myself,
but my heart cannot be convinced.
This hurt feels heavier,
as though today’s sorrow has reached backward
with cruel fingers,
digging into scars I thought had healed,
peeling them open
until the past and present bleed together.
It becomes a two-headed monster,
yesterday and today fused,
one clawed hand clutching my memories,
the other raking at my chest,
leaving me gasping,
unsure where one wound ends
and the next begins.
My sadness is no longer a passing storm,
it is a tide that never recedes.
It drags me into its undertow,
pulling me farther and farther
from the shore of myself.
I sink into the silence,
my lungs burning,
my body heavy,
my heart weighted with stones
I never chose to carry.
I cannot tell if this is punishment,
or simply the cruelty of time,
to circle me back again and again
to the very place I broke.
Every cycle cuts deeper,
like the clock’s hand is a blade
spinning over my skin,
reopening what never had a chance to close.
There are no words vast enough
to contain this grief.
It is an ocean without horizon,
a cavern without floor.
It echoes through me
until even my bones ache with its sound.
I fall into the silence of it,
a silence too loud,
a silence that devours every attempt to speak.
And still, each morning,
I open my eyes to the same repetition,
a loop I never asked to live inside,
a cruel reminder
that sometimes the deepest pain
is not in the past at all,
but in the way the present
reaches back and ties me
to everything I could not escape.
Oct 8, 2025
Oct 8, 2025 at 8:41 PM UTC
This was meant to be a haibun. After the
first sentence, I folded the list of rules into a sparrow. I go for a walk,
pass by the place where people write haiku
and roll juxtaposition into irony
as they eat their meals with the wrong
ends of their chopsticks.
he lifts gari with his left hand—
a slot machine jangles
A patron’s nearly full dish of wasabi sits amongst sushi platters that, except
for the left behind rice-explosions,
have been emptied. Around the corner,
a shaman stands near the clocktower
where the grass has died from a winter’s salting. The shadow of a ginkgo leaf flutters on his face like the wings of Buson’s moth. I want to turn off all the lights so that it can see.
The systems are broken. **** The systems are failing.
Further up Beverly St., an autistic boy
plays with Lego on a front porch. I try to remember his true name, and hope that
he can help break down the foundations, raindance his mind around the blocks’
angles and lines to solve an equation with a variable that is the shaman understanding
why the boy pretends to not see us.
Turn off the lights so that we can see.
Nov 12, 2021
Nov 12, 2021 at 11:19 PM UTC
Every night, I lie in bed and think of her, her lost eyes
My heart cries as I see her sitting alone
Staring vacantly out the window at the bird feeder
The bitter truth is
The things she forgets are the banal moments
Her days have become groundhog, so is it so bad to not realise that she is in that cycle?
The things that matter she still remembers
The time when she was 8 and had laughter with passing soldiers
Playing pranks on those same soldiers with the cheeky grin that’s never left her
When she nearly ended up in Canada to stay safe
Sharing sweets with the best friend she loved and lost
She remembers mum when she was just a foot tall
She remembers me when I could only utter the odd word
She remembers my brother when he had the cheekiest grin, and the brightest laugh
She may even remember better than we all do
Its funny how that works
Laughter is the best medicine she tells me
This is something I now believe wholeheartedly
As every time I see her I see it in action
She makes me laugh
She helps me understand life
She respects me
She builds me up
Strength, endless strength
Smile, the smile it never leaves her
Leaving her breaks me,
But seeing her break, hurts me.
Reality, she isn’t broken
Just stuck on the rewind button
She’s still here
She’s still with me
She’s one of the lucky ones
I’m one of the lucky ones
We’re one of the lucky ones
People ask how is she doing?
I simply answer she is in a battle against groundhog day, And get this she is winning.
Apr 25, 2021
Apr 25, 2021 at 8:15 AM UTC
Lawrence Hall
[email protected]
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
The Presentation of the Rodent
“The Feast of Candlemas…is perhaps the most
ancient festival of Our Lady.”
-Missale Romanum
The Catholic funeral home calendar
Prints “GROUNDHOG DAY (USA)” in generous type
“The Presentation of the Lord,” well, not so much
And “ ” 1 not at all
Perhaps one day we faithful will look out
From our dark-tunneled burrows of lost time
And gaze upon the morning shadows to ask
If there will be 2,000 more years of civilization
Because in the Temple
Our Lady presents unto our Lord the Child
But we present unto ourselves - a rat
1 The Purification of Our Lady
Feb 1, 2021
Feb 1, 2021 at 10:57 PM UTC
yet i stand again alone and cold
watching
an onslaught of angry wet bullets
pummel my peanut-shaped torso
if every midnight a new ghost
was born to loop again through my day
all my naked peanut-shaped torsos
would be standing here
too
all my red veiny feet burning a hole
through the white ceramic floor
and thousands of the same absent brown eyes
watching
– only a few
seeing
all my fingertips work in sync
rubbing face cream into
millions of layers of sticky skin
as our gurgling stomachs tie themselves into knots
and we record in our dejected minds like abused children
shivering in the corner of our skulls
the sickening feeling of
being both
perpetrator and victim
Sep 5, 2020
Sep 5, 2020 at 1:39 AM UTC
the alarm clock
in my childhood bedroom
has always been
fast by a minute or 2
every month or so i
realign the last digit
with Apple's universal truth
and every month it
slips
out of sync
again
it must be off by such a small fraction
of a second
i tried to calculate it once
0.00001 some-odd something
one brick so minimally out of place
causing the gradual collapse of a skyscraper
i havent found the energy lately
to practice this ritual
and today
my old clock
is fast by 3 minutes
neon green bars flickering silently
marching on
announcing fates to the unwilling and
making
rash judgements
there was nothing i planned to do
with those 3 minutes
and i knew it was
justified in its conviction
but i
realigned the last digit
and watched for 3 minutes
the green flickering rhythmically against
the black screen
climbing minute by minute
finalizing again
my execution
Aug 26, 2020
Aug 26, 2020 at 3:29 PM UTC
A lot has been written about monotony
Here I’m only trying it from my vision
It won’t differ much from yours
But even monotony comes in different flavors
Mine is bland. Unimaginably bland.
So much, that I fear the day I spit it out,
it will leave me bitter
I make feeble attempts to break it
A lot like a fifty year old couple argue & fight
They are not trying to spice things up
Just sorting the disagreements and inconveniences that crop up, further strengthening their bond
Each one is a proven pain in the other's ***
But it is familiar, comforting pain
Losing track of the days that I lost
The days they come and go so fast
I’m preparing myself better for the days to come
‘Every new day is an opportunity lost. So you’ve got to seize every opportunity.' I was advised..
It was 00 hours when I woke up
from my untimely slumber to start
this new day on this new note
Although I’m skeptical of the meaning of new day
I don't think they meant it in the technical sense
The day they were referring to probably begins
when the sun shines so bright that it is hard
to keep your eyes closed and pretend to be asleep
In a semi awakened state,
you clasp your genitals,
then scratch them,
stroke your stiffness,
wipe the drooling mouth
or partake in other preferred activities
in any order you deem fit
and thereby amass the requisite energy
to seize the day by the *****
Me,? I’m not really a morning person
It takes a couple of hours for nausea to subdue
After I spat all the toothpaste residue
So I take this to be the start of yet another day which has begun,
and will roll,
with reasonable certainty,
just the same way as did yesterday
Or the day before
Or a day the week before
But I wasn’t here since the beginning of time
I grew from a microbe to a maniac
So I know this is just a phase that will pass
But I can’t seem to place
the beginning or end of it
Shedding hairs, bloating with worries and fat
I came to the sudden realization
that this will soon end
Whether I like it or not
Whether I force it or not
It will come to an end
Like every other thing that started
Here I am, waiting for it to unfold
Like the spectator I’ve always been,
passive with fear and with justifiable cowardice
Dec 6, 2017
Dec 6, 2017 at 12:24 AM UTC
In deep winter’s chill a brief nudge
gets groundhogs, with barely a grudge,
to predict the season,
but I ask, with good reason,
if they differ, who will be the judge?
Feb 2, 2017
Feb 2, 2017 at 10:15 PM UTC
opening my chakra
feeling a little less darker
a couple of drinks is my marker
but its always just the starter
at the brink and then I'm past it
it was fun while it lasted
now I hand over to my master
from the poodle to the mastiff
screaming who wants war
blocked from the liquor store
my mind wants more
but my liver isn't sure
back to waking up at noon
soaked in bile like some cartoon
know that by the time I see the moon
I'll be singing the same tune
Sep 18, 2015
Sep 18, 2015 at 1:21 AM UTC
Next Sunday
When he leaves
The tomb,
And it's sunny,
Before noon,
Should his shadow
Fall on a sinner,
We've six more weeks
Of a Canadian winter.
Mar 29, 2015
Mar 29, 2015 at 2:33 PM UTC
depression set in
like the priest to sin
trying to hide it
when it all begins
the snow falls down
barring you underground
hell bent and heaven sent
who the **** knows were my mind went
no way to win
put on a grin
hide it again
your souls caves in
exploding imploding
like the shore life eroding
this should not be how time is spent
Feb 2, 2015
Feb 2, 2015 at 6:24 AM UTC