Shirley Manson reading of Chris Connelly poem –

“This is a sand, just like centuries,
When all is forgiven,
Still reigning from the hour-glass,
Round like a lens in the sun,
As the competition marches point blank to your zero,
The circling hunger just howls like an audience,
Try to determine each way, each cry,
Each muscle of the language
Too tired to communicate,
No longer exiled,
But your will, it remains so,
Prone like an X in the sand,
Defying any water to fall on this land,
The dulled overview presents only spectres of a life,
Red, Adriatic, Caspian, Dead,
Move like the ghosts of the dead air,
Measured steps, and fatal betrayal,
This is sand from the centre,
Curved fracture of the world,
The steam that lies beneath the sea,
The broken window passage,
Glass reflection of the landscape,
These are more than injured times,
The tidal inches towards total,
The tide inclined where it cant find,
The time slipped in the fractured world,
Hidden by curls of steam,
They trace out a map of affliction,
And it matches the citys disguise,
Now owned by the frightened in the margins,
Bathing their fear in the space between storms,
The choral that you breathe to,
The choral that you breathe against,
Walks out of the air and undresses in front of you,
Triumph and funeral, ghost of the air,
Wretched, crippled clothes decorate iron-dark water,
Ophelias opposite with a blue-black grin,
The stars and the last of the electric light
Pick out and reverse the features,
Gluttony of theatre,
Blue-black and grinning again,
Hand-claw attack pose,
Like the monger just froze flat against the frame,
The background paintings,
Skill of the pardons you will not hear again
The sutures unreason,
But they punctuate skin,
Illustrating the fracture of world,
No more severe skies, no more air,
As the insects multiply and ignite,
No more air, no more air, no more air”.