Prime Time

At the dinner table, you pray for the food,
and then turn on the TV screen,
News flashes and a video pops up,
dirty, half-naked, people around a mic,
and in the background, a settlement,
a dozen women and children finding food.
from a freshly dumped canister,
while a child licks polythene covered in dal.
You tell your wife to change the channel, that
how the fuck, prime-time news at 9:00,
shows this, knowing that people,
will be eating dinners.

What made you so uncomfortable?
as much as that you puke,
wash your face and come back clean,
and grab a pill from your drawer,
so the sleep can kick in, after the day’s work.
Your guts will prune and dance,
and wasps sting sharply in your stomach,
and needles turn into nails, in your head.
Till the pill you took, is puked out,
and again you wash your face,
and come back clean again.

Later when you recede in your bed,
and tired and exhausted your wife comes,
and says, ‘not today’ and starts snoring,
you start playing with the thoughts,
of the women, you looked at, from your
smoke tinted office overlooking the,
construction site of a 30-floored corporate
concrete jungle uprooting the
300 make shift one-room-tenements.
The bare breast of that half sick-women,
feeding her skeletal son, arouses in you,
a darker you, and you wait for the son,
to quit sucking, so you can look,
the colour of the nipple, the size, the shape,