KK DE LA VIDA

Heart Vine: Veins on Fire

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[This is not the story of first kiss bliss. This is not an allegory of primal lust nor cosmic origins. This is not a fairy tale of timeless togetherness, stitched in supernatural riddles or rhymes on repeat. This is not a chronicle of love co-opted for pop choruses, circulating myths of convergence. This is two flesh in cardiac arrest, near-death, at their most tenderest – first touch.]

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Our lips split like melting liquid from ice shields, falling fate into ocean’s abyss. We closed our eyes and let our ribs align like key locks to the source’s door, opening a whole swallowed by crashing waves. Our fluids, swimming between us, followed the route of kingdom’s mouth, a castle of guiltless transgressions. Confused but curious, we circled back and forth, blind hips aroused by gap’s slippage. Still, we shook like skeletal rocks during seismic tremors. Deep in the architecture of bipedal spines, deep in the rising staircase of dreamtime, our beating chests ruptured skyward, stalking spires of desire.

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Once upon a time, we both zombie-walked like broken mirrors on television screen. Razor-sharp bites of heartbreak’s sugar spikes glass gutted our biochemical entrails, spilling out hacked kaleidoscopic fragments, refracting a shattered palette of plastic poisons. The taste of rusted blood and burned epidermis surfaces drowned our tissue in bitterness. Enclosed in fallout’s ember, the hunger of mortal hurt cut up our insides, splintering outer-is-other as our selves. We were dead, buried corpses escaping wired from the cave of shadows.

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A floating blanket of fumed clouds embedded the green mountain in a silky, silvery mist. Every oak leaf, pine needle, thistle spike, drooping orchid and maguey petal soaked in the dripping pulp of moonlit precipitation. Every push of rushing wind echoed fluttering bird wings, ascending the steep cascade of trees. Everything, cycling like a ring of fire. Dense elements of humidity, hidden at this height, exuded both a tense of primitive exotic and primeval familiar. The churning choke of coming storms gripped breath at the neck, guided suspense to the next turn of elements.

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We merged with the mushrooms. We co-corrupted our collective conscience through fungi-soil synthesis code, facing a frontier background of condensed unknowns. We digested the division of duality, of black earth and white bone. Reborn through remixed senses, we touched the edge of ego’s end. We touched 'til lush jungles of orifice follicles pooled us into psilocybin folly. From hair tips to tip toes, we dived inside the glimmer of metamorphic limbs, flipping skin suits like mermaids of sacred springs, sirens beyond the border.

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We sketched a treasure map of pleasure’s terra incognita over open surface wounds and tucked corner folds. Deep-sea hued black-blue bruises silhouetted plot’s emergence, like ancient hurricanes of celestial bodies orbiting nebular necropolises. At the intersection of earthly page edges and milky way margins, a continental land bridge swelled free from frozen sea floors, exposing a phantom flood plain oriented to distant stars. Though projected tempests colored the cartographic panorama, over and over again, we weathered past this limitless test to uncover a correspondence of parallel points, of meridian delights: Your fingers. My toes. Your pelvis. My thighs. Your tongue. My wrists. Sensuous conjunctions.

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We were aliens before the artful magic of planetary labyrinth alignment. You, hailing fireball from the northwest coast of arctic peninsulas, avalanching into tropical volcanic bedrock and melting in my arms. Me, islander spirit stuck on stolen continent, hiding in concrete darkness, emerging white-out-eyed from pioneer forests. Our descendants were seafarers once, though a body of water, of opposite possibilities, polarized their collision courses, for future singularity of our sinking ships seashore clash across space-time.

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Ritual firsts invert the inert weight of common sorrows and symbols. Colonization, through the enculturation of christianized education, ripped up our people’s pagan book of beliefs, so that the raw underbelly of violence, of hunger’s rape in the heartland of strangers, could be cluelessly justified; but the complex, chromosomal codex of two variant species riding a bed sheet cover over their differences could not be reduced to such deconstructive deductions. Our encounter of energy exchange engaged a circular relationship composed of reciprocal influences. Warned, we were warmed by the flames of festive mutation, of mutual combustion.

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Apart of that fixed rite figured-8 infinite film reel, we fucked contradictions. A part of deliberate acculturation or spontaneous assemblage? Apart of regeneration or destruction? A part of living or dying? Apart from breathing or releasing the opposition, did we resist?

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Along hollow crevices of hypothetical universes, bouncing signals hit wood cabin walls to flow two polar directions. The pyramidal temple-complex, the built center of spiritual ascendance, aroused a view above, channeling heaven’s vision of knowledge. Beneath its catacombs, a jewel bosomed the tower through mineral traces of luminous dust. You metaphor’d me in media res, this temple in the tempo of moment’s desire. I voodoo’d you in flash forward control, this precious stone of found shell and sand. Hearts encompassed by a cybernetic hourglass, we finally shattered momentum’s threshold and crushed our artificial containers.

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Because truth simplifies to this: A temple is simple to desecrate and abandon, while a point is hard to erase. Like the radical cut, witch hunt, lumber guillotine, tree loss of limbs, let-go of hair,  let-go of life, of built-up suspense bridges, of world trade meltdowns of opposing f(r)ictions: Heat’s steam rose, bloomed howl blow of cloud head’s release. We succumbed together, to the fire. 

KK de La Vida is the eco-erotic avatar/naughty nom de plume of a tropical islander traveler from FuckForForest.com. Though no longer with FFF ("Heart Vine" is their break-up letter), Kk continues to explore the creative power of human sexuality to help ecology, currently pursuing an MA in Media Studies at The New School, a Public Performance Art Fellowship with the Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative and co-founding the CosmiKnots collective. Kk's writing is published in Cliterature and Milk Journal, forthcoming in Snapdragon and The New Engagement. While based nomadically along the Atlantic sea, follow Kk's trail of pixel dust on kk.persona.co and instagram@kkdelavida.