Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

It creeps and crawls like consequence,
It trickles and drips like false pretense.
It grasps, and tackles, and manipulates,
An instinct meandering throughout the primate.

If wonders are that which never cease,
Wounds are mistakes, imperfections, a crease,
That lie like open wounds waiting for salt,
Opening and shaking an earthquake fault.

It attacks and I defend, without an instinct to pretend,
That a person so different from me flowed,
Who cannot see all the way down the road,
Will turn me into an elderly toad.

At least, not today.

Being unable to fully understand, and thus not really a man,
The meat is too red, the garage isn’t clean,
The kids aren’t in bed, the grass isn’t green,
My sense of humor is dadly obscene.

The offspring have grown at far different rates,
The spectrum has grasped many future first dates,
And there is little I control from my doghouse of care,
And there is no way to dodge the merciless stare.

At least, not today.

I’m having some trouble getting up my website.
She says, that’s easy and you’re stupidly not right.
She says that our home is lacking in friends,
And secretly wishes that it could possibly end.

At least, not today.

At least, not today, will I give it away.
At least, not today, will I stand up and say,
That abuse will not stand, not one more day.
That instinct will come out of hiding one way.

But then again, at least, not today.