Status Updates From Theoretical Animals

We sail through most days dressed in strangers
and unmarked souls. Children of singing suicides, their magic plundered
and sucked out like sweet fruit, empty their bruises onto dirty plates. Iron
faces fat and slumberous from the death machine drift up to the shoreline
decks, their weightless tongues grubbing ante-mortem blood.

What atrocities have these people been allowed to forget? The bleary-eyed doctor that tousles my child’s wayward hair, the old woman two doors down who claims to remember my father when he was a boy... and all I see are the shadows that evil shrugged off, the abandoned sickness that hauls up the spikes of their smiles. The only people to trust are browbeaten hookers and professional liars.

The sun and the breeze pay each other compliments on her skin
as she lays by the pool watching the gentle movement of what passes for
stillness. Her husband has chosen to stay in bed today. He will get up when
the clock permits him a drink. She is on her third already and sees no end to it. A seagull, its feathers flawless, balances on the terrace railings watching her perspire.

The methods can be elaborate;
I’ll say that. All manner of disfigurements come our way, and what looks
like a natural can sometimes hide a technique so subtle and ingenious that
lesser practitioners would almost certainly have missed it. That said, the
hatchet men still dominate the market by quite some margin.

Is this capitalism?

Joe hates the land-noises:
filthy industries built on the chasms of erased futures, the endless patterns
of dirty crisis, the sparks of electronic presence give him ruinous headaches.
At night he hears the fields wriggling with swallowed tongues and suicides.
By comparison, the fat residues on his hook are but the gloop of honest toil.

But the madman, king of the subjunctive,
in the hour of plots, defended my rubbish-tip dream as I sailed storm-tides
in the blistering rain, feeding motherless girls and boys to me through the
deep, vulture-worn horizons. The water pulsates its angry infection and I
sigh: ‘Infection always fucks the masses.’ The grave expression on man’s
measured laugh tattered - nothing.

struggling with this a lot on between all the evocative imagery because it's just so ethereal and hard to grasp. will try to read around 10% a day until i reach the finish line because anything more is overwhelming