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!
Amen, waiting for my antiviral juice too, Jim.
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I love this! Funny, clever and pertinent!
Hope you get that antiviral jiuce soon.
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Thanks Kim!
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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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Thanks Brendan!
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I would love to hear this sung to a mean 12-bar. Sorry you have the blues but I did enjoy this!
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Thanks Ingrid, much appreciated!
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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?
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Thanks Sherry…it’s slow coming but hopefully by end of May!
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Well, I like that humor! We have one down, one to go.
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Thanks Eilene!
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Don’t say I never warned you
When your train gets lost …
(K)
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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’.
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Thanks Kim, mid April hopefully!
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