I got something in.

I like the idea of guilty gorging on Halloween candy after the day, and most of the poem spoke to that fine, but the "no longer keen" felt wedged in. I didn't get what that line was saying. Rhymes all work fine, but there's no meter, if one was intended. Cute enough for a quick read.

Nicely done in structure. The only hiccup I had was that I normally hear "peculiar" as 4 syllables, where it needs 3 to fit the meter. Other than that, the rhymes, meter, and repetition all work great, and that's a tougher stress pattern to write in. I'm a little less clear on the meaning. The speaker definitely feels like his dedication to his work is less than that of the termites, though I don't know whether it's strictly a work ethic thing or if he finds their constructions artistically pleasing as well, more so than his own work.

So... I like the mood of this, and the language use was good. But I'm lost on several fronts. One, only the longer stanzas have a rhyme scheme, and only in that they end with two couplets. I'm no scholar of poetic forms, so I wouldn't know if this is a traditional one, but it seems closer to free verse, or at least close to blank verse, as the lines are all iambic tetrameter. I spent so much time looking to see what rhyme scheme there might be that I got distracted from the actual poetry. Like the previous one I read, the meter has one hiccup that relies on a word, "fire," that can be heard as two different syllable counts. I think it's more common to use it as one syllable, but it has to be two to fit the meter. Excusable enough, but you play it both ways: the second time you use the word, it has to be one syllable to fit the meter. Well, plus "wilderness" is kind of wedged into the meter, as you normally wouldn't stress the final syllable of it when speaking.

As to meaning... I get that the speaker finds a burned-out house in the woods and muses on how it fits with its environs. That part was fine. But the ending seemed to be making a point out of that, yet what it was saying went over my head.

Since the last two lines of the second stanza rhyme, that has me looking for a rhyme scheme, but there doesn't seem to be an intent for one. The rhythm works fine.

As to what is happening... I have no idea. There are plays on candy names, some of which I get and some of which I don't, but the overall effect is that there's a hidden joke that's going completely over my head. I really don't know what to make of this.

A poem about inspiration and gratitude, and a little recursive in that it seems to reflect on its own creation. I think the image of a poet working in their house, while observing termites building their own house within that structure, is nested and anatomical. Then there is the abundance of the termites themselves, which are so prevalent that the speaker can't seem to avoid seeing them. With the declaration of guilt at the end, which might be ambiguously trustworthy, it all rings a little like something from Edgar Allen Poe.

I like the contrast of the phonemes '-unch' and '-een' in this poem, and it concludes with an energetic type of alliteration.

A few lines about off-brand candy. Hmm, that last line in the third stanza... Needs to rhyme with something. Either 'course' or maybe 'pyramids', though that's a toughie.

Like an autumn leaf, a stanza seems to have fallen from this poem, and leaves the conclusion a little dried up.

What caugth my eye here were these four: parquet/cliché/soigné/blasé

I wanted to read them as french loanwords (rhyming with just each other) - they're spread so evenly throughout the poem that maybe, I thought, they're meant to break up the rhyme scheme for some intended effect. But I can't recognize or think of any effect that'd add to the poem.
So they're probably meant to be read with english pronounciation (rhyming with the ey/ay lines) I guess?

>>Pascoite
>>Heavy_Mole
>>Corinna

Thanks, folks!

As always, I have one word that throws the rhythm off because of ambiguous pronunciation. So "peculiar" will become "eccentric" before I start sending this one out to the poetry magazines. As for the French loanwords, once I had one in each of the first two stanzas, I realized that I needed one in all four, but yeah, they're supposed to rhyme with the other "ay" words.

As for whether the narrator's crazy or not, I'll leave that up to the reader. From the first word of the poem, he seems to think he's on the road to becoming an Edger Allan Poe character, but these artistic types, I've found, never seem to understand their own work... :)

Oh, and if anyone wants to hear me reading a little Hallowe'en rondeau I wrote maybe ten years ago, it's included in the 2024 SFPA Halloween Poetry Reading. The poem's called "Halloween Weather"--though I continue to insist that "Hallowe'en" needs that ' between the 'e's--and it's a little more than halfway down the page.

Mike