Your Desk Or Mine?

Yevgeny S is in distress. His stats

On fertile females, working hard, who are

Unpatriotic—childless, raising cats—

Reveal some news that doesn’t please his tsar:

Damn workaholics threaten Russia with

Extinction. Now there’s urgency to mate …

So long as numbers of your kin and kith

Keep falling, Yev tells workers, copulate

On every lunch and coffee break or face

Reproval by the boss. Don’t make him cross,

Make babies, join the race to save the race

In hot desk office space as soon as poss …

No condoms!—bona fide Russian line

Extenders only for, “Your desk or mine?”

 

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Florida State University who has returned to live in his native England. His acrostic sonnets have appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Better Than Starbucks, The Creativity Webzine, Current Conservation, the Ekphrastic Review, Grand Little Things, Light, Lighten Up Online, MONO, the New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, the Satirist, the Washington Post and WestWard Quarterly. The poem was prompted by the Metro story “Putin demands Russians have sex at work after country’s birth rate plummets.”