The old 1998 internet dial tone plays
on the Incubus track I’m
listening to and I realise
Incubus probably feel similarly
nostalgic about that sound.
I listened to them a lot in the days
when I’d also suffered that chug and rushing
and those beeping noises, hearing
being the sense that is most evocative
of memory, which I have written about before
some night, some time in the assumably recent
though perceptibly secluded past. Or was it smell?
I don’t know. It’s not important. Time is important,
the way it just goes, minutes, hours.
Most days seem this way, as if the daily naps
I’ve been having are years long.
Maybe that’s why I feel so old, why the weeks
are so fast, so far removed from each other,
why I can’t seem to focus on anything anymore,
biologically alerted to what needs to be done
on some surface level, far above the depths in
which I found Incubus and in which I wish
to remain, surrounded by bubbles and blue
whales, cephalopods and luminous creatures,
the unpredictable, the wise, the unexplainable
and the vivid: it’s good here, very good.
There’s always music like Incubus, and the
internet is fictitious, just a legend the blue whales
hum about sometimes, as the cephalopods,
luminous creatures and I quietly shudder.
