Waiting for that Vaccine (aka Limbo Blues)

14 Replies

Waiting for that Vaccine (aka Limbo Blues)

today I remembered limbo
you can’t stand too far from the track

the first line is about memory
the second is a disconnected fact

Bob Dylan mentions Rimbaud
Van Morrison does too

today I remembered limbo
Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus

existential boogie
do that existential thing
been waiting for that vaccine
summer, autumn, winter, spring

if you’re looking for an answer
don’t ask Albert Camus

that dude’s been dead a long time
he can’t tell you what to do

and old Rene Descartes he said
I think therefore I am

well I call that a beginning
I don’t call that a plan

waiting for that vaccine
waiting to cut loose
hit me with your best shot
of that antiviral juice

Johnson, Moderna, Pfizer
I don’t need no appetizer
hit me with your best shot
of that antiviral juice

Over at earthweal, Brendan asks in reference to the pandemic “What tools in the poetic repertoire are there for describing and naming and calibrating it?” A good question!

This poem is adapted from two other poems – ‘Limbo Blues’ and ‘Existential Boogie’. So the form I picked is a sort of mutating blues and humour is a part of my poetic repertoire (although not everyone might agree ), so I used that!

14 thoughts on “Waiting for that Vaccine (aka Limbo Blues)”

  3. earthweal

    Yes, we hover in a huge dangerous global limbo waiting for our turn at the shot. It’s a degree more hopeful (because there is a vaccine now) but the existential wait is Godot-ty. Well done. – Brendan

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  5. Sherry Marr

    I so appreciate the humour, grinned all the way through, very impressed with rhyme and metre…..excellently done! A treat to read! I am 74 and am waiting too….things move slowly in Canada, eh?

    Like

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  8. kim881

    I’ve had my first jab, Jim, and hope you get yours soon. I so enjoyed your ‘Waiting for that Vaccine Blues’, I could hear music in my head as I read it. My favourite lines:
    ‘existential boogie
    do that existential thing
    been waiting for that vaccine
    summer, autumn, winter, spring’
    and
    ‘…old Rene Descartes he said
    I think therefore I am
    well I call that a beginning
    I don’t call that a plan’.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

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