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Enamel memories are chipping again. I can feel my moments, the ones I loved and hated, dissolving.

Grandma’s cupboard forever. Some things last, linger, slight, but always. She used to keep white pepper in used containers which once has other functions. Ouma. Your grace, even when dignity left you like a thief in the night. Everything smelt like piss, these fucking nappies. Your eyes are already stretched landscape, wise lady. Recite a poem , eyes glow, mash for lunch again…they forget about me.

There was a house on a hill, it smelt like rubber. It had porcelain saucers behind glass, displayed. Outside I used to run in between layers of clammy washing, drying perfume in a breeze. I built a house in the yard, for me, with roof-tiles an hope it would not fall. This house on the hill had a backdrop of brewing clouds, feverishly watching. But everybody thought it was just the weather.

And rain on a window as well, chipping, falling broken glass a scattered dream maybe. Grandma’s house in the rain, us shunning at first, the zinc-roof aggressive tonight. Scrabble, poems about dark horses, running through the woods, cigarette, gulp of wine sweet, bed. Now everything is luke. My grandma’s teeth are in a cold, winter glass of nightwater. I have the radio on my chest, on the lowest possible volume. I am listening to a voice in the night.

I did not care about where they buried her Ouma. Just a vessel, like those old metal jar and bucket, decorated, to wash, displayed on a dressing table with a mirror. Waiting, to purify, to bring warmth on a night when the windows battle with a wind that seems so angry. I started my love-hate relationship with doors when i was still growing, developing into another half of a gender. Close it, nobody is seeing me turn into a woman. Now open it and confront temperature, tearing at my skin.

I saw you the other day in the corner coffee-shop.
You were talking on a cell phone, ordering a laté at the counter.
We used to play together when our parents had Friday night barbeques. We liked going to the toilet together to watch each other urinate. Once we played doctor-doctor and I stuck a crayon up your arse.
We loved each other, didn’t we?
Your favourite cold drink was cream soda flavoured Soda Stream.
You were very possessive about your He-man. I could only play with the power of Grey Scull when you wanted to share your toys with me.
When I saw you in the shop, you stood in a suit, so tall and handsome and groomed.
Your girlfriend appeared briefly wearing label and a fake hair colour.
When she kissed you in the neck you laughed and I got a flash back to one day when we were running in the yard with a hose pipe, chasing each other.
You left the coffee shop with your cell, your coffee and your woman. When you noticed me, you quickly turned your gaze away.
I watched you leave and I remembered.
How I loved to watch you pee.

I was seated in a little coffee- shop in a narrow side street in Lisbon. I cannot recall if I was busy writing or if it was during one of my intimate photo-sessions of doors and windows. As I stirred my coffee I noticed a homeless man sitting on a step about ten metres away.
My eyes stayed on him for a while before I noticed his hand in his pants. I had to look again to realize he was masturbating, staring directly at me. Nobody else seemed to have noticed this. It was just him and me in this moment. He really was dirty.
I looked at him again, now moving his hand faster, his gaze fixed on me.
Though I was uncomfortable, I looked directly at him. Every bone in my body wanted to get away from this savage-looking being. I wanted to turn my gaze away, but I didn’t.

I kept looking at him until his whole body quivered.

go there! http://www.rashmag2.blogspot.com/

a lot of kagablog contributors on board, including cherry bomb, gary cummiskey, anton krueger, derek davey, vesa kivinen, dorette krueger and cecilia ferreira who also edits rashmag. it’s well worth a visit!

When I finally fell asleep again I took a short cut past the old movie theatre towards the old sugar factory. I knew I was going somewhere. In my dream I knew where I was going, in my bed under a humid sheet I didn’t. But it all mixes and before long I was walking on the pavement in my dream, not knowing where I was heading and lying in my bed sweating, knowing exactly where I was headed in the dream. I ended up heading towards the ruins close to the train station not having a clue where I was going, but going there with the firm footsteps of somebody who knows exactly where I was going. What matters is that I got there, tired from shifting between the concrete pull of urban under my diesels and the soft lines of crumpled sheet printing on my skin.

The corrosion by the train station was an old little primary school. It had two public bathrooms, browned with time and stagnated in disgust. It used to be a place with movement and laughter bouncing hollow between the tiles, but now it has become revolting memoirs of events that linger in stench and mysterious decay. I heard my alarm clock go off, echoing in the corridors of the broken building. As I turned around to open my eyes and feel my skin sheet clinging, I see my towel hanging lonely on the rail in the corner of the bathroom. My navy blue little hand towel with a picture of a yellow little duck. It looks so sad, my little towel. I want to go and save it from the rail. But we always have to wake up, don’t we?

Yes, the dreams left some nasty sheet prints on my body. My skin is still tender from the night. Only coffee would straighten out these paths of dream now. Maybe that horrific breath of fresh cigarette might do it too. Better get this head straight whilst my urine is still hot. It hits me around three sips down a line of caffeine: my navy blue little hand towel with the yellow duck on it. How strange it was seeing it there, hanging still new, brand new and soft and colourful in a setting of public waste in macabre shades of time. I wished in the dream I could walk over and touch it again, dry my hands with comfort and that which was only mine in a class of thirty. I would tonight. Tonight I would go back and dry my hands on my navy blue little hand towel with a yellow little duck.

As the day stays afloat I feel a strong pull towards my dreams. I cannot help myself, it really becomes a desire as strong as only a mind can brew a potion. I need it, I need it so badly I cannot stand the resistance of night anymore. It starts twisting and turning inside me, this storm of need to dream and to be in the night. The lunch hour sun is a foe of mine and late afternoon sun cannot pass quickly enough. I had eyes for night only, for in the mystic black lies dream, my dream of my towel, my lovely, soft blue towel. When dusk finally arrives it becomes a hunger. I arrive at home and smoke a joint, drink wine, take a sleeping tablet, all at once: I need to go back to the bathroom: My little blue hand towel is there.

So I fall to sleep, plunging clumsily and making a splash, snoring, deep. For a long time I am not aware of here nor there. A third person sees me lie in a frozen pose underneath a thin layer of half sheet half darkness. I don’t even make a sound breathing and my body is past the twitching face at the gate of dream. Next to me scattered on the bed is evidence of substances sending me to where I think I am going. There is nothing strong about me lying there in a green coma, drooling slightly by the corner of my mouth. Yet I am going there, walking fast past the old cinema towards the sugar factory. Oh yes, I am going, I am panting fiercely and holding my pose even when the stitching starts in my side.

I am running to catch up with my childhood. There was so much truth in the immediate gore of pulling teeth and scraping knees. There were also lies, those lies about tooth fairies and tales about Dettol not burning. I needed to go through it again so I could find the missing piece to the questions I have now. When we are children we don’t know that clues to us are everywhere. These clues can only really be seen by children during their childhood, but they end up too busy begging for sugar and coming up with stories why they hit the guy with the Spiderman- outfit in the sandpit. I think I should’ve kept all my milk teeth, maybe I could throw them like witchdoctor-bones and the answer to the turbulence of my adulthood would appear in patterns. If I could travel back and pick up every single bloody tooth I could, to find the answers, but the fucking tooth fairy took them all.

When I finally get to my little hand towel, I run to it and grab it and smell it and push it against my face. It smells like cheap soap. I look at it carefully and observe everything about it. The colour was fading slowly, the picture of the yellow duck started tearing off on one of the corners and here and there I see a little toothpaste stain. I always thought my little hand towel to be the prettiest in the class. In kindergarten it was such a big part of my identity. Everybody knew that the dark blue towel with the picture of the yellow duck belonged to me. When we had to go and wash our hands or brush our teeth I reached for my towel and it was mine and only mine. Once a week we took them home to get them washed. There was just no way I was going to leave my towel in dream. There was no way I was going to leave it there, my little dark blue hand towel.

My alarm clock signals hollow again. I need my towel. I grab on to it and push it as close to my chest as possible. I hold on to it like we hold on to life. We will get sucked into present reality together, my little hand towel and I. I would sew the corner of the picture of the little yellow duck, give it a wash and start using it all over again. I would smell it daily and recall every single memory in the corridors of the past, tunnelling through my brain. My little blue hand towel is the answer to absolutely everything.

I wake up with a headache.

I walk to the bathroom and wash my face. As I reach for the towel and push it against my face, I get a strange sensation.

Man, this headache is killing me.

I wonder what I dreamt about last night.

I always forget my dreams.

How do you keep count of happenings?

You make a mark and another and another and before you know it you stand in a prison cell, with every single wall covered with your own art. It once happened to me. I was a prisoner of war, making my marks, day after day. I created hundreds of drawings to try and escape a one- roomed shit hole. One day I stood back and saw all my creations and all I wanted to do was to escape them. The sight of my insides on the walls made me ill. There was no means by which to destroy it, this art. I had no matches. I had no toilet. I had saliva and a stomach and I started making lunch out of my soul.

I wanted to prevent me spilling myself on the walls again, so I asked the guards to take my charcoal and to take all paper. Before long I was in a cell with no means to create drawings. I tried not to dance around the room, but the shadows on the stone walls formed such beautiful pictures, I had to dance and look at my shadow. It took only a few hours for me to feel suffocated by the stories told by my shadow, so I asked the guard to block out all the lights. I would go into the black hole to not see myself, I thought.

Inside the hole was black, pitch black like the eyes of demons who sometimes come for me at night. I started putting my mouth against the stone cold walls, making vapour on the surface. That way I would know that an impression of me could exist on that wall for at least a few seconds. It would be my own transparent breath-ink flowing for just a little while until the wall would suck it in again. I thought about this and there was no way of asking a guard to take away my vapour.

Unless…

In art I always find myself chasing something.

I relentlessly and irrationally pursue that which reveals itself in pieces, that which taunts and seduces me. The pursuit is never complete. It is a lasting cycle spinning around us and through us. When it comes for me, it comes for me with colour ten times rounder than the colour of wine, smell, ten times the familiarity of a jersey with your lover in it, sound, ten times more than the panting of life, blowing in an ear and feeling, ten times the electric pulse of hormone in a vein.
It spins. It totally ruptures me until the point where I am faced with my own insides, confused about the frailty of being.
I dry my body in rose and in steam. Bacon’s fleshy pinks are us: we are carcasses in suits.
I open my thought and the shutter. Rothko dawns exist: daily colours melt into one spirit as twilight knits night and day in a quick and intense embrace.
I touch myself in blue tones. Picasso’s absinthe drinker rocks me to sleep.
After midnight it’s often Goya. He rips my dream.

And that is the hour when I just can’t sleep.

I’m sitting in the sun socializing with friends, braaing on a Sunday afternoon. My daughter is playing with two other girls, slightly older than her. They are excluding her from their games. She tries hard to get their attention, first by being mean and when she see’s that doesn’t work, she tries all kinds of methods to fit into the two girls’ “circle”. I’m tripping out on space cake, observing this very carefully. Ultimately I can interfere but would the learning process not be more effective without my involvement? Then the scene just sort of freezes: two girls sitting on a blanket on the grass, playing with little plastic tea cups and saucers and my daughter, the third girl, standing about a metre away in the shadow of the umbrella, for that moment just staring into nothing.

Beautiful, beautiful outsider, standing in an orange dress and curls, shining in the sun. The light is turning into that rich melancholic yellow that only happens on Sunday afternoons as the weekend fades. I feel breathless, as if someone tore out my heart, ready to put on that braai.

How it kills me sometimes.

Our security guard (well, the dude basically just opens the gate for us and watches our cars at night) has a wife of twenty years old. They have three children, she being four months pregnant. She goes to the doctor with fever. He diagnoses her with malaria without doing a single blood test on her. She goes home and takes the tablets. (the people here are not even educated about what they should or should not take when pregnant.) Next day she is much worse. She is turning all yellow and the fever is very high. Goes to the hospital, they tell her to go home and rest. Next day she can’t walk, has fever and starts becoming delirious. After four days they finally admit her. Kept saying they are still waiting for tests. They even start speculating that it could be yellow fever, which only exists in the north, really. Next day they had to revive her. Following day our guard goes to the hospital at eleven in the morning to see his wife, they told him to come back at 18:00. In the meantime, we ask one of the doctors we know to go and check on his wife. Turns out she died of a liver failure at seven in the morning (four hours before they told her husband to leave and come back.) My husband had to call him and tell him his wife has died.

Anybody living in these parts of the world know that malaria tablets ain’t the best thing for you liver. If one of the dudes could just put two and two together, actually test her before giving her pills, she would still be alive.

But hey, she has fever, let’s just give her tablets and see the next patient.
I’m so sorry. Sometimes i just have to vent about something like….hmmm, staying alive.

www.rashmag.blogspot.com