Our son makes a pile of purple tinsel
on our living room floor and calls it a tinsel puddle.
Don’t stand in the tinsel puddle Daddy,
you’re not wearing your tinsel boots.
He jumps over the tinsel puddle and back again
enough times for a clock to move five minutes.
He walks to a bag of baubles
and leaves the tinsel puddle glistening
like a set of freshly cleaned teeth
or an eye that hasn’t seen too much.

Carl Burkitt 2023