A dictionary would define "dad" in a few calm words. Lucina31 defines it twice, and the two definitions cannot be reconciled. The opening lines give the version the world hands out: a hero, a protector, "someone who keeps the monsters away," a friend to play ball with. Then comes a blunt "But to me," and the rest of the poem answers with the speaker's own version. The real subject is the gap between what the word "Dad" promises a child and what this particular child received.
The construction is simple, and that is why it works. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are short and close to speech, and most begin with "Someone who." That repeated phrase does two jobs. In the first stanza it keeps the portrait generic, a list of roles anyone could slot a father into. In the second, the identical pattern carries accusations: "Someone who forgets to call / Someone who disappears for years on end / Someone who forgets his promises." Because the grammar barely changes, the reader hears the warm list and the bitter list as mirror images. Even the gentlest image gets turned around. "Someone who dusts you off when you fall" comes back at the end as someone who "leaves someone else to pick up the pieces." Falling is no longer a scraped knee but a broken family, and the person who should have done the dusting is the cause.
Small repeated words carry much of the meaning. "Forgets" appears twice in the accusing stanza, as the father's habit. It returns in the final stanza, where the speaker admits that the "far off dream" of a happy family only works if "we forget the sleepless nights and the drugs." The poem suggests that this kind of happiness needs amnesia. "Play" is turned the same way. The father is first "someone you play ball with," a real game. Later the family only "play[s] happy family," and the word now means pretending. Even the "monsters" of the first stanza look different by the end. Judging by those sleepless nights and the drugs, the threat the speaker needed protection from may have come from inside the home. The poem never says so outright, and the hint is more unsettling for that.
The emotional register is carefully managed. The most painful line is also the plainest and shortest: "Someone I used to love." The past tense says what the speaker has lost without any exclamation or outburst. Earlier, "would rather raise someone else's child instead of his own" is cutting because of "rather," which turns absence into a choice. The final sentence is the longest in the poem and runs on like a verdict. It also changes the vocabulary. The title puts "Dad" in quotation marks, as though the word is held at arm's length, and the last line drops it for "father," which sounds colder and more official. Then the grammar stumbles: "a father is a someone." After all those "someones," he never gets a name or a face and stays an indefinite pronoun. That seems fitting for a man who is mostly defined by not being there.
The poem is significant because it speaks to an experience that greeting cards and Father's Day assemblies leave out. It gives the child's side, and it does so without self-pity or neat forgiveness. The love that remains is mentioned only to be placed firmly in the past. Some of the spelling and punctuation is rough, as in "rollmodle" and "family's," and whatever the cause, it gives the writing the feel of someone speaking directly rather than polishing the hurt into something tidier. The poem takes a familiar format, the "what is a dad?" definition, and turns it against its own subject. By the end the list of what a father is has become a list of what this one was not.