The speaker lists everything they can read with ease: newspapers, reports, essays, comics, poetry, even the dictionary. They can read a child's happiness and an animal's too. Yet after each list comes the same refrain, "I'm illiterate in love." The repetition makes it feel like a confession the speaker keeps circling back to, unable to move past it.
The turning point comes in the middle, when the poem imagines the signs of affection being "spelled out" and "pushed directly in front of my face." Even then, the speaker squints, ponders, over-analyzes and debates. The problem isn't a lack of clues but a habit of overthinking them. The final lines name what stays unreadable: the other person's attraction, interest and feelings.
The mood is wry but a little anxious, even lonely. The plain, list-like style mirrors the speaker's careful, analytical mind, which works perfectly on text and fails on people. The poem suggests that being smart doesn't help when the thing you need to read is another person's heart.