The Dinosaur Ranker (Selfless Parental Love)

Lyrics

The house is asleep.
Everyone but the Cretaceous.
And you. And me.

The lamp makes a small yellow sun on the rug.
And your world is laid out here.
All the titans of the Morrison Formation.
Lined up by some logic I will never know.
The Tyrannosaurus, he's always first.
The Compsognathus, always last.
We found him in section 567.9, remember?
His page was almost torn out.
Your finger traced the spine.

And you are the great dinosaur ranker.
The final word on the club tail of an Ankylosaur.
And I am just the keeper of the list.
The holder of the flashlight.
The quiet librarian of your magnificent, temporary museum.

It's Tuesday night again.
Or maybe it's Saturday morning.
The coffee is getting cold next to the paper I was supposed to read.
But you have a question about the plates on a Stegosaurus.
A very serious, very urgent question.
And the world stops.
My world stops.
It arranges itself around the answer.

Because you are the great dinosaur ranker.
The final word on the club tail of an Ankylosaur.
And I am just the keeper of the list.
The holder of the flashlight.
The quiet librarian of your magnificent, temporary museum.

One day, these plastic bodies will live in a box in the attic.
This encyclopedia will gather a different kind of dust.
You won't remember the Dewey Decimal code for paleontology.
And this love, this very specific Tuesday-night love...
it won't disappear.
It will just... change its shape.
It will learn the rules to a new game.

But for now... the Spinosaurus is third.
And that is the most important fact in the world.
Sleep now, my little ranker.
Sleep.