Haunted Objects, by Scott Jensen

Haunted Objects

by Scott Jensen

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1.	Intro 01:40	info	buy track
2.	My Brain 00:17	lyrics	buy track
My brain is a dry sponge dying for a good drowning. My tongue tastes like pencil shavings and my fingertips smell like firecrackers in the summer air. I want to be inspired, more than anything else.
3.	The Fence 00:24	lyrics	buy track
"Do you think you can make it all the way over?" I asked through the chain links in the fence. You told me you didn't know if you could, you must have seen me cut my hand on the barbed wire. We stood there quiet in the winter air. The steam rose slowly from your nose when you exhaled a sigh of sadness. The blood dripped from my skin to the white face of the snow at my feet. Standing there in the cold air I looked at you through the fence, you seemed so far away.
4.	Falling Star 00:24	lyrics	buy track
The sky held back the rain like a sneeze that never happened, we sit on the sidewalk trying not to huff the gasoline fumes. With fingers laced together, we count the bricks on the run-down building across the parking lot. Be my lady forever and I promise to try and stay this clever as long as I possibly can. I hold my breath then bite my tongue and wait for the next shooting star.
5.	Prelude To A Record Burning 00:34	lyrics	buy track
Lying on your left side in a football field, you woke up. The sun had only beaten you to consciousness by a few minutes and the empty high school bleachers were blanketed in the light blue morning glow. When you sat up to put on your shoes it set in that he left you to wake up alone with nothing but your tiara to accompany you. The dew covered your prom dress as you left to find a pay phone to call a cab for a ride home. Regardless of being the newly appointed prom queen you woke up alone, and feeling alone never seemed so literal.
6.	Clean Needle, Made In China 00:23	lyrics	buy track
I really thought you were happy before I saw the needle dancing in your arm. It was hanging phallic in the bend of your elbow, I saw it wagging right after it blew its load into your hot red bloodstream. I thought you were happy when you were sober. I don’t think of you happy now. Not anymore.
7.	Odyssey In Cement 00:18	lyrics	buy track
Quiet skylines and gas station receipts. Silent bylines and parking-block breathers. Onward, over, away and gone. Caffeine prayers and deep breaths. Mix tapes and bright green wanderlust. Reasons to be hopeful.
8.	Untitled From June 6th 2006 at 1:08am 00:29	lyrics	buy track
Walking home slowly on a night like this. My feet stay close together stepping on the blank spaces between the double yellow lines. Heel to toe and back again. The repetition is my slouching mantra, my wish to carry me back to where you used to live, when we would fall asleep together with the TV on. Heel to toe and back again. I want to go back again.
9.	A Solitary Dysfunctional Death Wish 00:55	lyrics	buy track
A sour taste. A slow thump. The blue insides it make sense again, Crumpled up and wrinkled like old newspaper. The train rode characteristically on its track. So what else can you ask the water but to choke the lungs? Skin covered in dried sweat and concrete bits, The sidewalks are a terribly lonely place But at least they aren’t a quiet apartment. So humor this hoarse throat and these ink-stained fingertips Because tonight, my dear, the drift was caught. It’s not any different because it’s not the same. Here again the insides became overcoats, And blue, how ironic. The violence of feeling dictates its laws. Love is like a shotgun, leveling all in its spread. Open-armed and in its path this man-shaped target stands, time and time again begging for a change of fate. Wouldn't you know? I’m damn immortal.
10.	The Hollow And The Haunted 00:36	lyrics	buy track
The damage was done, slow twisting, the sight of her smiling through the hushed soliloquy of the sick Saturday night when she sucked him off. Passed the past it’s easy to fake the replay of the dashboard light gilding across her gentle features covered in sex sweat as something less haunting when his name is mentioned. These apparitions will never find their way home, The ghosts will always be earthbound. So I offer them a seat and open a beer, It looks like I’m going to be the one who needs changing.
11.	(De)composition 00:34	lyrics	buy track
The soft touch of his kiss slides slowly over the skin of her neck. I’m frozen stiff under a pine tree with needles poking into the pale skin of my back. The gentle touch of the corpse flies crawling in my nostrils keeps me awake. Ashes to ashes, bones to earth, soul back to the dirt that God scraped from under his fingernails. Dancing on the border of infidelity she smiles genuinely. His touch is soft. His kiss is warm. Mine isn’t even cold yet.
12.	Spinning 00:25	lyrics	buy track
The wiring in my ceiling fan is screwed up. Most of the time it doesn't work right. In the summer I turn a box fan on and point it up. If it's tilted just right the breeze it blows will spin the blades of the busted ceiling fan. When that happens it looks completely normal, like there's nothing wrong with the wiring and everything is fine. You are my box fan.
13.	Angelscrape 00:27	lyrics	buy track
The sky rips in half and the earth screams her name. My skin shivers as I taste the poison on the back of her teeth. She gasps between stabs to hear the grinding of my spine, bone on bone. The purity of death and the ecstasy of grief is what she sheds with every passing embrace. I hold my breath for fear of smelling her on me, because if I do this may all be real.
14.	Fission 00:42	lyrics	buy track
Have you ever wondered what your soul looks like? Or anyone's for that matter? Is it orange and yellow, a burning color like something exploding? Is it shaped like an outward expanding mushroom cloud? Like the sun we built on the ground in Hiroshima? Does it obliterate every damn thing in its path and turn everything alive into a gray dust? Does your soul act different from everyone else's? Or does it flicker and spit like the single hanging light bulb swinging from the ceiling on its extension cord noose? I guess, in the end, it really doesn't matter what it looks like. Only how it lives and if it chooses to lay down and sleep.
15.	Every Time I Drink Green Tea I Think Of You 00:24	lyrics	buy track
I remember your voice and the nights we would stay up writing verse after verse. I remember your skin, switchblade hipbones and your sly & sleek smile. I remember your eyes and how I could never put a clear description on them. I remember how easy your name is to say, I hope that eventually, I'll say it again.
16.	A Strange Group Of Sisters 00:23	lyrics	buy track
They were all born with the same color hair, and the temperament of a litter of cats. It bothered me, to say the least. They would all laugh in this high-pitched tone and circle around, much like I would imagine velociraptors hunting. They were one weird group, just to make an understatement. One weird group. To say the least.
17.	Please, Don’t Feed The Metaphors 00:40	lyrics	buy track
Should I take your coat? Welcome. Make yourself at home, just like all the metaphors. You know- the silly things we say, like; “Two birds with one stone” Or “Grab the bull by the horns” Or “Like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs” and a ton of other sayings we can’t remember the origins of or at least where we heard them to start with anyway. Whether or not they have animals in them, we love our metaphors just the same. So, Can I take your hat too? It really does match your shoes and coat quite nicely. What is it made of? Leather? I hope not- you might offend the metaphors.
18.	Lonely Girls 00:34	lyrics	buy track
Thick winter coats cover up the lonely girls. They wear the colors dark yellow and brown mixed with deep greens and sometimes a rich purple. They button their fronts all the way up. They shiver and shake, they fool like it’s February in the first weeks of fall and they shudder with scarves tossed over one shoulder. You see, the lonely girls wear the thick winter coats to cover up the bodies they don’t much care for. They dress up in this year’s fashion, only the latest, only the warmest. Even if it isn’t cold.
19.	Paper Doll 00:40	lyrics	buy track
Are you always going to stay the way you are now? Standing on the line and being another guy's paper doll. I'm not offering to pound the sidewalk by your side; this isn't me trying to lace fingers or migrate into your warm and fuzzy heart-parts. This is me saying that you are way passed one dimensional, no sheet of shaped and decorated paper could ever hold you. You are still heroic in black and white photos but your real life wonder- inducing splendor is laid inside you, passed poetry and 11:11 wishes. No one can ever find words, not him and defiantly not me. But still, I don't mind the view. Not at all.
20.	Miles From Rest 01:11	lyrics	buy track
I took a walk with Dee Dee Ramone and John Berryman down to the harbor on the New Jersey shore. It was the middle of the night. I dreamt the long and short of it days ago. They both did their best to teach me about patients. They suggested I wait for her. I held an unopened pack of cigarettes in my hand the whole way. That life was always there to go back to. The Whiskey and tar-battered lungs are always a half a step away. If need be. Dead men or not they knew more about life than the people around in the day light, those people claim that I’m callow and closed up. I quoted Robert Frost in an attempt to seem somber. I explained how I was feeling the nights get longer, how life didn’t feel so full when her voice is a phone line away. I didn’t know I was figuratively dead until her blue eyes woke me up. Dee Dee laughed when John joked about how “figuratively dead” was better than being dead all together. I decided to laugh along; I enjoy that type of black humor as well. I spent the rest of the night listening to their stories as we staggered on down the waterline until day broke and I woke up better than the night before.
21.	On Crafting Art 00:16	lyrics	buy track
Smile through insecurity, Tumbleweed. Fumble towards greatness with a smirk and bits of thunder stuck between your teeth. Make it matter, make it shiver and most importantly burn it at both ends.
22.	Dwell 00:35	lyrics	buy track
Inverted I swim, deeper and farther away. The ocean whispers in a symphonic voice, and I feel I have found a quiet home here. I taste the cold salt water on my lips and feel the frigid rush blanket my scared skin. I embrace this new journey with open eyes. Three hundred fathoms dropped I find the counterstatement nature proposed to our constant cries and omnipotent questing. I call out to the expanse that embraces me, and find its arms already firmly around me. Here, below the surface, I am finally home.
23.	A Lock-Jaw Prayer 00:53	lyrics	buy track
Do you remember the rain falling all the way down from the sky and slithering across our scalps? Do you remember "waking up" under that street light like "waking up" was something we had just figured out? I know I'm not a great poet, but I'm a good man who has been seeing his way to wishing pop up like the daisies he’s not ready to push. I want to lock us up alone and someplace quiet. Away from dry skies and hot daylight. Someplace distant where we can duct-tape our hearts in cigar boxes and give statistics the finger, because who the hell cares? We’ve got these scalps that love the slither of rain drops, we’ve got these hands that need holding to keep from shaking and these eyes that need "waking up" like "waking up" is brand new and ripe in the wrapper. I'm not ready for the daisies yet and maybe I can learn to be a better poet, but for now I’m just praying, in a lock-jawed rabies-type way for the street light and waiting for the sky to fill.
24.	Outro 00:37	info	buy track

about

The 10th anniversary of the first self-published chapbook "Haunted Objects" has arrived! To celebrate I decided create a makeshift recording booth in my living room closet and record it (in all of its "glory") in audio book format. Please keep in mind that these pieces are getting a bit on the "aged" side, I promise that I'm MUCH better at what I do now. Regardless, here's to days gone by!