Echoes of Covid

poems by

Donald Cohen

Pure Heart Press
ISBN: 978-1-59948-930-8, 145 pages, $16 (+ shipping)

Release Date: May 6, 2022

Dr. Donald Cohen is a licensed Marriage and Family therapist, in private practice for more than 40 years in Weston, Connecticut. Dr. Cohen received his M.S.W. from Columbia University, his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from California School of Professional Psychology at Berkeley, his post-doctoral fellowship at the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University Medical Center. The author was the creator, producer and host of the popular weekly television and radio show, Kids Are Talking. He is currently the host for the revisioned Kids Are Talking, streaming live around the world. The show is produced by award winning Square Squared.

Phantom Unmasked

Phantom of my former self
Unmasked from the hidden cavern
Purify the pain
Like a newborn
Life altered
Unfiltered fault line
Lighthouse of the mind
Emerging light illuminated
Masked emotion unveiled
Slowly over the Coney Island boardwalk
Ready for carnival

My Secret Silence

Madly, deeply
Can it be?
Really?
For me a dream
Out from the mainstream
A love
That could last
Not from my past
The everlast train
That tracks less pain
Rides the sane in the brain
Bathes in the rain
After sundown
Riding the carousel
Merry go round and round
Madly, deeply
Lost and found
Balloon journey on a string
Lift from the ground
The sound inside
Of my secret silence

Emptied Out

I feel the traffic on the inside highway
Dusk before the night
Unpresidented America
In an unarmed game of blame
Something going on in Wuhan
With silent china
World war corona
Humanity stripped persona
Bruised from bondage
Bandaged up
Boarded up windows
Lone Rangers mask wearing us down
Alone,
Outlawed from the outbreak
Horror in freedoms shadow
Partisan pandemic maniac
In a panic, manic state of mind
Raging in contagion
Miss the presumed and assumed
End of who we once knew
Spreading octopus tentacles upon us
Confiscated aimless Monday
Life abbreviated
Loudness goes silent
Face without features
Walk desolate streets
Didn’t know I didn’t know…
The freeze in what we do know…
Forethinking echoes
Of a yet unknown normal
Unreal timeless irrelevance
Russian roulette of existence
Resistance in denial
Burdened by cognitive dissonance
Languishing in,
The sea of the chosen
No parity in racial and economic disparity
Desperate depression
Lost in the fog
Ground hogged bogged down
Day into night-night into day
The week of undifferentiated today
See the clock without hands
Feel the ghosts of lost time
Inconceivable next fall
Monotony without a say
Exhausted existential melancholy
Four seasons in distorted disorder
Invasion of our border
War in our back yard
Cancellations, rumors spread misinformation
Ruptured by our infrastructure
Animused and dismissed
Restrictions creating frictions
Barraged in economic carnage
Enforced reflection
Alienation from contamination
Lines of starvation
Where is the CDC guidance?
Shadowed in the story of we
Forced to be
Captured in Orwellian hell of complexity
Forget what was remembered
Nation’s suffocation in isolation
Tolerance unmasked
Silenced by invisible violence
Friendly fire from the violence
Testing patience
Living a pestilence
We are the patients
In a “Job” like trial crisis
Life’s closeness
Emptied out

Madness

Unexpected march madness
Enslaved sadness
Virtually actual
March into the unknown
Chaos in the madhouse
Mindlessly mindful
Fully grown
Can’t be indifferent to what’s different
Uncertainty to see
Deficit of trust
Absence of transparency
Anxiety of comorbidity
Plague of mortality
Our life warranty expiring
Calling frontline necessity
Paradoxical around the clock
TikTok wiped out
Ghost calendar
Erased without a trace
Instantaneously meaningless
No longer oblivious to oblivion
Science not fiction
Utopian becomes dystopian
Echoes in the new and ancient past
Ghosts of repetition
Dreams of mitigation
Fight for soul to stay whole
Skin hungered for human touch
Absent future
In the moment
No vaccine
Quarantined and distant
No more toilet paper seen
Some alone separate from home
In a social straight jacket
Schools close
“Tom Hanks, trouble in the big banks”
Cruelty of confinement
Instigate a mood
Stranded in solitude
Living a real-life bad dream
Health our commonwealth
Staying in, coming out
Science being silenced
Reimagined, embraced and nourished
Humility and solidarity
Collective confidence
Empathy not sympathy
Reset planet
Star to star six feet apart
Drilled to our core
Distilled to our essence
Loss of our reflective immunity
Madness hungers for herd immunity