“Conversations about my Recent Separation #3”

“Conversations about my Recent Separation #3”

How I'm supposed to recognize
when I’ve crossed into self-indulgence
I suppose I’ll never know.

Though it slips from me like a dog
again, I’ve read enough about love
to know it when it finds me,

and to know what it causes men to do:
drink and fight, and write, and smoke staring out of windows,
and bore their friends to death

describing the geography of human condition
that we all know in our bones by heart-
reciting to an automatic nod, those threadbare poems of mourning.