Can we please have sex right now? by Jack Houston

CAN WE PLEASE HAVE SEX RIGHT NOW?

said the Prime Minister to the public 

relations executive, but it isn’t funny,

in fact ignores the strictures of the joke

entirely as she’s not an actress

and he’s never been clergy.

I do have some sympathy for him,

knowing what it’s like to really want

something, one’s toes being stuck  

into the smooth sand of the draconian, the past

exactly as it should have been, the loosening

of a cummerbund after a large luncheon

as it won’t be long until the dinner

invitations arrive and here we’re lined up 

at table, our sharpest knives out

alongside our plates the other side

of our various forks, glasses of wine 

and water filled for what’s to come:

the flustered speech before the guests,

the sound of the rain drumming 

onto the canvas of the draughty marquee, 

the hope of finding a piece

of sky amongst all these edges –

two meters isn’t too much between, we should now spread the length

of this large table. And it is enough for my two-year-old 

to ask what the blue thing is 

in his willy. That’s a vein, I say. 

Don’t worry, I say. It’s a good thing. 

It takes the blood that pumps 

from heart to lungs, through brain

and kidney, spreading whatever

all over, having it flow

like a dancer in the middle

of a too-short production, 

not wanting the lights to come up,

to have to finally take their bow.

When not living under nation-wide quarantine instructions, Jack Houston can be found staffing Hackney's Libraries and teaching Poetry for Age UK. Other examples of his work have appeared in the magazines Blackbox Manifold, Magma, Poetry London, and recently highly commended in the UEA's sex-writing symposium I'll Show You Mine Prize.