CORONA DIARY: a collection of new poems by Nick Toczek
In mid-March 2020 I began writing a daily diary poem about the pandemic, posting each on my own Facebook page and on Janine Booth’s excellent CoronaVerses page. My initial intention was both to document the course of events and to give myself a daily writing discipline which would double as a journal. To my surprise and satisfaction, these posts became popular. The best of them seemed to catch the zeitgeist and speak not just for me, but for others. As a writer, you can’t hope for much more than that.
Here then, month-by-month, are my pandemic poems and lockdown lyrics. Some have already been published. Others have been set to music. You can find me performing some of them on various performance poetry platforms posted on YouTube, Facebook and other such sites. A book of the first few months’ poems is soon to be published under the title Corona Diary.
Covid-19
We’re So Safe
Dead Rite
Limerick
Poem For A Few Weeks From Now
Grim As This…
Be Positive, Be Keener
Simply To Live By…
Back Garden
Acrostic Odes
To Donald Trump Who’s Calling It The Chinese Virus
Close Up
Utterly Unprepared
How To Pass The Time While You Isolate
Celebrating The Joys Of This Singular Spring
NHS Acrostic
Unspeakable
Where Are You Now, You Cocky Bastard?
The Dead
Wishes
Regular Handwashing
Only The Virus
This
Sympathising With The Tories
April, Cruelest Month, Brings Us…
Poem To Each UK MP
Conversation With The Virus
Poem For Boris Johnson
It’s All About You
Because Interviewed Experts Begin Each Reply With “So…”
We’re All Here
The Virus Addresses The World
Stalker
The Two Of Us
Unfaithful
Via Us
Two Poems: Game #1 + Game #2
Shall
8 p.m. Every Thursday
Separation
At The End Of Lockdown
Corona Blues
The Cost
A Testing Time… At Last!
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Come What May
Poem For Matt Hancock, Health Secretary
Second Peak
Your Life Under Lock-Down
Carers
Almost Forty Thousand Dead Here In Britain Alone
Clapping Verses
Oh, A Nature Poem!
Of Course We Miss…
Lessons
They Make No Sense
Mixed Messages
Landscapes By Hieronymus Bosch
Tell Johnson And Trump We’re Not At War
Short Sentences
Five Linked Limericks
Because of Our Impatience
Re-opening Schools The Week After Next?
A Week Of Gardening During Lockdown
While I’m Out Walking With My Bloody Mutt
Wish List
Normal
Doubters’ Creed
A Poem About You, Dominic Cummings
Carehome Ghosts Speaking
Press Conference
Cabinet Versus Corona
Johnson’s Latest Baby
Anticipation
Me
Poem For My Partner
JUNE
Tory Bastards In September / October
Ending The Honeymoon
Imagined Guest
Signing Out
Surrounded By Idiots
We Poets, Adverbally
If I Were The Virus
Government Will Duck The Blame
For Those Who Still Trust Our Governing Gang
Where I Went During Lockdown
As We Hit More Than Sixty Thousand ‘Excess’ Deaths
Loner
We’re Been Shopped
Some Days Under Lockdown
Evening Walk
The Virus Invites You…
We Weren’t Always Old
Their New ‘World Class’ Track’n’Trace Phone App
Just A List…
Run By The Bullingdon Boys
Life Will Be Better When…
When Lives Don’t Matter
Two Metres Down To One
If This Virus Kills Me, Here’s What I Did Well (100th poem!)
The Rag Trade Reopens
Marooned
Why Reopen Everything?
When This Virus Hits Its Second Spike
Sea Fever