NovPAD catchup #8-9: even worse than 4-6

I don't want to say much about these. I feel obligated to post them because they are what I am resigned to call my response to the past couple of the November Poem-A-Day prompts. The prompts were good. I just couldn't make much of them. These, frankly, kind of embarrass me.

NovPAD #8: Talk back to a dead poet. This is in response to Rainer Maria Rilke's Archaic Torso of Apollo,

Your smiling hips,
St. Walt's electric

body, can one hide
in Baudelaire's

million writhing
worms? Impossibly,

in each atom, the
whole, the body composed

of microscopic
homunculi, tiny tenders

feeding tiny fireboxes,
a convention of

will-o-the-wisps, some power to cause
us to glow, to burst like that,

to step forward into a new day.


NocPAD #9: Use the phrase “When he’s gone…”


We never buried, just burned
his body, reduced to a few spare souvenirs from the
event, relics. He was 
no  

holy man. Though when the wind struck up on the hallow
e'en I half expected to hear a pressed laugh, at least to
see him. Is the cancer there still, constructing cities in his

guts, breeding slovenly in the dampened dust
or has he seeped into the wood by
now, drawn through the vegetable capillaries, so that he's
everywhere when he's gone?