Fallow lay the fields of these poet’s lips; 
the soil of my soul spoiled from years of deluge and drought, each coming on,
one after the other, without warning,
without an air-raid siren bleeding a red alert through the hollow of the night.

The goddess of the grain has left the page beneath the plow of my pen
barren and intractable, the lines printed on the pale winding sheet
sutured into silence as soon as they are dry,
and the bloodletting of my uncultivated desire stanched in feeling
entombed in language chiseled from cold Carrara marble
as soon as the river runs down my wrist. 

The muse of song has abandoned her duty.
She has sacrificed the vessel of verses that I once was
and discarded me to decay in the dust and clay of my own flesh,
a fractured artifact engraved with the scars of two decades of misspent passion
once feverishly sculpted into pristinely polished stanzas. 

Dominick Montalto is founder of A Poet's Perspective, a blog featuring biweekly blog posts on a variety of topics, primarily geared toward writers and those interested in getting their work published, including weekly reviews on Wednesdays. The blog features an Editorial and Writing Services page where readers can take a look at the type of services Dominick offers, and also has a variety of his previously published poetry and essays.