Syntax You say "love is a dog from hell," like you wrote that for the first time, & supposedly home is where the heart is & hell is other people, but sadness is the absence of God and so love is His or Her or Its presence? You speak in these similes & exclamation points, these hyperbole & fragments, & I have no ideas anymore on how to translate your meaning into my meaning. I don't know how to read you. I create my own tools to create meaning. I take scissors & glue & paste & try to make a text in your language. I read the lines of your face & I gauge my successes and my failures. I don't know how to speak to you! & if I break it down to this: your subject, your predicate, your verbs to give action & us to receive it, no matter how many times I proofread or take notes in our margin, it just doesn't make sense. & if you told me that we aren't wire & streams of consciousness volleyed & slammed back and forth into each other's skulls - you know, just for emphasis - I'd say you were a liar. I pick up the pieces. But no matter how many times I try to piece together the subject, the predicate, the adverbs, the notes scrawled into margins, our margins, & on bathroom walls, it never translates. It never makes sense. I don't know how to read you.