The speaker is haunted by figures of extreme hunger and suffering—starving eyes, fragile ribs, hollow gourds—tied to Shiva dancing across a withered plain, which gives them a mythic, destructive force. He admits he is afraid to wake them from dreams or speak their names, as if naming them would make their reality impossible to ignore. The night already whispers those names to him.
He then asks someone to hide with him among glossy magazine ads and the future they sell. In that space, the suffering lose their names and become “shadows of rags” or “shifting dots on the television screen”—still dancing, but safely distant. The mood is uneasy and guilty, caught between knowing about human misery and numbing it through comfort, media, and distraction.