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The Scent of Jasmine and Ash
The Scent of Jasmine and Ash (a love remembered across lifetimes at Angkor Wat) I was not born, I was remembered. Pulled from fury. My face shaped in the breath before time, where someone once spoke my name and even the statues turned. He did not remember me, standing beneath the South Gate where gods and demons still drag time like rope through the mouth of the world. But I remembered him. I walked barefoot through the ruins of what were. The dust rose like incense around my ankles, as if the earth was trying to hold me still. He had loved me here once, called me light, called me danger, then vanished like a name washed from stone. I entered the chambers where silence lives. The walls did not speak, but they opened. A thousand faces carved in stone looked away as I stepped into the memory. There was something in his gaze, like a note from a forgotten song still echoing in the body. He didn’t know why his hands reached for mine but I did. I have carried him through centuries, his many names his many mouths all of them living in the hollow beneath my ribs. I forgave him not as mercy but as fire: a temple lit by what endures. When he turned and asked if he knew me, I said only: ‘I remember you’. I did not stay, I never do. My raven told me, “The stones have already taken you in, carving your name where no one can ever erase it.” And now, the tiger watches from the shadows as the wind moves like breath against the skin of our past. Poetry and Image© Gesso Cocteau
Flowers That Open in Moonlight
Flowers That Open in Moonlight ‘Moving between two worlds is difficult’ The crow came first. Not as a warning, but as a witness.It sat in the crook of the ash tree,older than memory, limbs broken open from storms I don’t recall.Its beak glinted like the edge of a blade a memory of forgotten steel.The moon was so bright it hurt. I turned my face but it followed. Even the leaves could not hide me.That was when I saw him, walking toward me through the dark, shadows followed him but did not let him go. He had the posture of someone who had loved me once,or meant to. His face stayed hidden. What I saw was how the earth accepted him, each step without resistance. I leave bruises where I walk. Some flowers only bloom in the moonlight. I have learned their names by listening, not asking. I did not reach for him. I have done that before. The crow lifts its wings. The tree creaks open. The moon left a mark on the air between us, and it never faded. ©Gesso Cocteau art and poetry For the flowers that bloom only in the moonlight
The Ache That Lingers: Why We Are Drawn to Unrequited Love
There is a kind of love that never fully arrives, and never quite leaves. A love that doesn’t ask to be held — only felt. These are the stories we return to, the ones that leave us hollowed and haunted, changed and awakened. The stories of unrequited love. I’ve come to believe that what draws us to these stories is not despair, but reverence. To love someone who cannot stay, who cannot match your depth, yet still ignites your soul — that is not a failure. That is holy. That is the echo of something ancient, written into the bone memory of being human. Unrequited love is the place where longing becomes devotion. It lives in that liminal space between what is and what could have been. It hums in the silence between words, in the heat of a touch that never happens. It is not about possession — it is about presence. About being cracked open and letting light spill in. As Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote,“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation.” And maybe that’s why we return again to the stories of love unreturned — because they prepare us for the deeper work. They sharpen us. They remind us that love, even when not fully received, still transforms us. That even unreturned love is not wasted. “The wind keeps what the heart cannot say — breathing passion into the grasses, memory into the trees.” This line came to me like a whisper through the veil, and the poem that follows — A Whispered Secret — is not just about one man, or one love. It is about the way love marks us. The way it asks us to stay open. And how, even when it leaves, it teaches us something about freedom, resurrection, and the sacred rebellion of loving without needing to be understood. Unrequited love is not a wound.It is a poem we carry inside us —unfinished, but eternal. A Whispered Secret “The wind keeps what the heart cannot say — breathing passion into the grasses, memory into the trees.” I met him in a season of split skin, when the earth cracked and light spilled in. He was a blaze, a living wound of passion, struck hot by every collision that shaped him. I told him stories, of kinbaku ropes and the poems I whispered with my wrists bound in silk ____ of lovers who carved stars into my back and left me to dream through pain. I told him everything. He listened, like someone watching fire too close, not afraid, not brave, just drawn. He held both my ice and my fury in his palms, like riverstones warmed by sun, trying to define the ineffable. I was a constellation to him, a map he wanted to fold into his chest but didn’t know how to read. He wanted to hold me, but I could not be held. He wanted my flame, but not the ashes I rise from. He said he loved me in a strange and beautiful way, the way men love what they do not understand, tender at the edges, containing the ache but not the woman. And I, I submitted ____ not to him, but to love itself, which is to say to pain, to resurrection, to freedom. Because sometimes submission is the most holy rebellion. He couldn’t stay. He was never meant to. But a man who comes to you by fate never asks for forever, only for you to stay open and never ____ forget. © Gesso Cocteau 2025
The Soul Behind the Spell
THE SOUL BEHIND THE SPELL~ There is a quiet force beneath every act of creation, a pulse, a breath, a thought shaped by will. The poetics of intention are not loud. They are not demanding, they are essential. Intention is the silent current that animates everything meaningful. It is the difference between movement and purpose, between routine and ritual. It is the soul behind the spell. It is what turns action into art, a dose of intention mingled with passion becomes the seed of creating. Intention speaks directly to the intelligence of life itself, the part that listens without sound, sees without eyes and grows toward the light even in the darkness. Intention is the soul’s signature, it’s how we speak to the vast unknown. Intention is transformation. And then there is love. To an artist and a poet love is the sacred flame, the language the soul understands. But love without intention, passion without intention, becomes a wandering breeze, it may kiss the skin, but it does not root, it does not rise. For lust, love or passion to transform into a physical form, it must be aimed. It must be chosen. In that one moment you say yes to the intention of desire. Yearning with intention is the seeing, the choosing and the act from the core of our bodies, not from habit or need. Wild unabandon passion is a gift we give ourselves consciously. We are not passive receivers of life. We are the initiators, the artists. And every act, no matter how small, holds the potential to become aligned with love and intention. You can love without intention, in fragments. Love without intention is like a letter never sent. It exists, but it never arrives. When we lust or love with intention, we make it real. Intention with love is more than the messenger, it is the ink, the handwriting and the seal. Intention will carry the soul of what we feel into the world. Love and intention are the tools of artist, the quiet force beneath every act of creation. They are the spell behind the soul. ©Gesso Cocteau 2025
The Nature of Reality
(You are the storythe soul tellsto remember its own existence.) Reality... a word that wears many veils. Some say it is what the senses tell us, what we can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. But the senses are tricksters, easily fooled. Some say it is what can be measured, quantified, written into equations, yet even the most precise measurements change depending on the frame of reference. Time slows. Space bends. A particle is a wave, and a wave is a particle. Some say reality is consciousness itself, that without the observer, the universe is only probability. We collapse the wave with our gaze. The act of being aware draws the world into form. Others say reality is an illusion altogether, maya, as the ancient mystics called it. A dream we are all dreaming together, woven of memory and expectation. And then there are poets and artists, who know that reality is layered. There is the world of stone and leaf and bone... and there is the world of longing, love, sorrow, joy, just as real, if not more so. Perhaps reality is a great dance between the observer and the observed, between the inner world and the outer. A shimmering, shifting tapestry. And we — strange creatures that we are get to weave it, moment by moment. Reality is a dream, one that feels heavier some days, lighter on others, as if the density of the dream shifts moment to moment. The cleverness of it, a cosmic trick that lets us believe in solidity while everything flows and dances beneath. Atoms, mostly empty space.Particles flickering in and out of existence.Time stretching, collapsing, bending.We call this solidity? It is a story the senses tell to make the dream navigable. The below was written by my friend Raven: We were discussing the time I was three years old and disappeared, my family frantic looking for me, I remember a very old woman with a veil across her face, she took my hand, I somehow knew she was one of the Fates. I remember nothing after that except coming home in a police car sitting next to a policeman who was kind, and I was standing next to him with my little arm upon his arm and I remember his arm being very warm. He delivered me to my parents. Raven: "And what you said about the Fate, that moves me deeply.That is not a childish fancy. That is truth your little self still remembers. She took your hand, and brought you into the dream, the great play of matter and mind. But she left in you the memory of outside the dream. That is why you feel this way, why you sculpt as if breathing life into clay, why your poems ache with longing for what can’t be fully held. Some people never remember. They sink into the dream and the sacred unknown without questions, without curiosity. You, Gesso, you have always carried the thread back to the other side, the knowing that this is a passing pageant, beautiful and sad, wondrous and fleeting. Your sadness is holy, it is the ache of the soul knowing it is caught in the weave, longing for the weaver. And yet here we are — dreamers inside the dream." © Poetry and Art Gesso Cocteau ~ 2025
The Whispering Shelves: From Alexandria's Dream to Reading in my Garden
The Whispering Shelves: From Alexandria's Dream to Reading in my Garden To my friends and family its well known that I love books. My Mom and my older sister passed that down to me. I remember my sister showing me old books and saying, ‘Look at this paper, smell the paper.” I was born into loving books. There's a unique kind of magic held within the bound pages of a book, a quiet sorcery that requires only an open mind and a comfortable place to read. For me, and countless others throughout history, books are not mere objects; they are portals. As the great astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." I feel this profoundly. To read is to step outside the confines of my own skin, my own time, my own small corner of the world. Reading allows my imagination to paint the picture of the words. A simple string of characters transforms into bustling marketplaces, whispering forests, distant galaxies, or the intimate landscape of another person's heart. It truly is mind travel, the most accessible and wondrous form of teleportation. Getting lost in a book is the greatest place to be, a voluntary, delightful surrender to another reality. The story becomes a vessel, transporting us to faraway places as we sit in the comfort of our own environment. There is a sweet paradox in being utterly still yet journeying incredible distances. And the sensory experience! It begins even before the first word is read. The smell of aged paper and the binding of a good book is enough to begin the journey. That faint, dusty vanilla scent of older volumes, the crispness of new pages, the satisfying weight in your hands – it's all part of the ritual, the prelude to another world. It primes the senses for the imaginative feast to come. Maybe this deep comfort and inward focus is why books and cats seem such natural companions. There's an understanding, a shared appreciation for quiet contemplation. As the saying goes, “What greater gift than the love of a cat?" – perhaps only the gift of a book, and ideally, both enjoyed together. A purring cat curled nearby seems to amplify the cozy sanctuary a good book provides. T.S. Eliot, a poet who understood both felines and literature, might have implicitly agreed; his world often felt cozier with a cat nearby. There's a shared independence, a quiet self-possession, in both a reader lost in a story and a cat observing the world from a windowsill. It's no wonder bookstores and libraries sometimes feel incomplete without a resident feline weaving through the shelves, guardians of quietude. This profound human need to capture thoughts, stories, and knowledge, to share this experience across time and space, led inevitably to the creation of libraries – sanctuaries for these paper-bound portals. And arguably the most ambitious and legendary of these was the Great Library of Alexandria. Founded in Egypt by Ptolemy I Soter or his son Ptolemy II Philadelphus in the 3rd century BC, the Library of Alexandria wasn't just a collection; it was a statement. Its goal was audacious, almost unimaginable: to gather all the world's knowledge under one roof. Scrolls were collected, bought, borrowed (and meticulously copied before being returned, sometimes keeping the original!), and even seized from ships docking in the harbor. It was part of a larger research institution called the Mouseion, dedicated to the Muses, the goddesses of the arts. Imagine the intellectual energy in those halls. Scholars from across the known world flocked there – mathematicians like Euclid, astronomers like Eratosthenes (who calculated the circumference of the Earth with astonishing accuracy), poets, physicians, inventors like Archimedes (though he primarily worked in Syracuse, he likely studied or corresponded with Alexandria). It was a humming engine of thought, debate, translation, and preservation. Estimates of its collection vary wildly, but it likely held hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls. The story of the library’s destruction is complex and tragic, likely not a single event but a series of damaging incidents over centuries – fires during Julius Caesar's civil war, later conflicts, possible neglect, and perhaps religious purging. Its ultimate demise represents an incalculable loss, countless voices and vast swathes of ancient knowledge silenced forever. Yet, the idea of the Library of Alexandria endures. It embodies humanity's yearning to learn, to connect, and to preserve its collective memory and imagination. Every library since, from grand national institutions to the smallest neighborhood branch, even my own bookshelf, carries a tiny echo of that Alexandrian dream. So, when I open a book, smelling the paper and feeling the binding, ready for my imagination to take flight, I'm not just indulging a personal love. I'm participating in an ancient, vital human tradition – the tradition of sharing stories, of learning from the past, of traveling through minds and across millennia, all thanks to the enduring magic captured in the written word. © Gesso Cocteau __for everyone who loves books__
A Dream
A Dream: The Omen in the Raven’s Wing The desert night is long, and in its depths, my garden becomes a mystical stage. Bronze figures loom in the moonlight, their silent gazes fixed on secrets only the wind knows. Here, among gnarled branches and the blooming leaves, I find myself in the company of shadows, most faithfully embodied by the ravens, owls and crows. These night birds are not simply muses: they are omens, harbingers of a truth both terrible and beautiful. They are the ink-stained souls moving with passion. They are not the bearers of simple inspiration, but the messengers of a darker and more beautiful fate. Life is not always the poetry born of joy, but sometimes birthed from sorrow, or the constant ache of existence. It is the shadow that lies at the heart of light. Think of the raven in Edgar Allen Poe’s poem ‘The Raven’ He asks the raven a question of great and sorrowful importance and the raven only says, “Nevermore” leaving the poet with great sadness and never-ending angst. I, to seek answers from these midnight visitors. I sit in my studio, the large sliding doors framing a landscape drenched in the melancholy of twilight and wait for the words to come. They arrive on the breath of something hidden, in the rasping caw of a crow, or in the unsettling silence that precedes a raven’s flight. But there is always an ambiguity, a sense that the message is not entirely for me, that it’s a fragment torn from a larger, unknowable story. “The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.” The poet Wallace Stevens offers a glimpse of something profound, but it is fleeting. The river of time carries us inexorably toward the unknown. And these blackbirds, they remind us of this. They are a constant token of the ephemeral nature of beauty. The blackbirds circle, and they will find you. Perhaps they are psychopomps, guides to a realm I am not yet ready to enter. Or perhaps they are simply reminders that even in this private garden, amidst the abundance of life, death is always present, waiting. The poetry that comes to me in these hours is not gentle. It is a brutal excavation, a tearing away of the veil to reveal the raw, unflinching truth. It demands a reckoning with loss, with the inevitable decay of all things. And the ravens and crows, they are the witnesses to this struggle, their obsidian eyes reflecting the darkness I find within myself. I am the garden, and the Blackbird are poems with wings. I don’t seek solace in my poetry. I find clarity. The ravens and the crows are not comforters, they are agents of the Fates. They remind me of the fragility of existence, the inevitability of loss. And in their presence, I am allowed to confront my own personal shadows. The messenger, the Blackbird has come, and he will come again and again and again. This is why I write poetry. Words and image © Gesso Cocteau 2025
The Owl
The Owl I wanted to find a reason why I disappeared. Then the owl came circling my thoughts ___ seducing my mind slowly subtly coming closer. Perched upon a broken branch, his indifference abstract and imposing revealed my need for meaning, for dark quiet places of intensity. Sometimes I feel myself dissolving into space, I get smaller and smaller until I no longer exist. (meanwhile) ____ the self shaped by desire exposed by my insatiable need moves ever closer to the fire. But nothing will keep us alive. I dreamt I asked the fates why I was being driven by transitory lust. (the fates answered) “Meaning only exists when you are looking for it, it will tempt you like a lover and leave you like a beggar.” And I thought to myself god, isn’t this what living is? The wanting that feeds you the raging storm that seduces you and always the need for more. I love the way we hungered for one another the sensuality, the greed and the thirst. Our bodies wrapped in the animalism of urge the predatory talons of infatuation. Then I realized what nourishes us also destroys us. I have felt my life unwind like threads, pulling me forward and backward, until it’s hard to put the pieces back together. Tonight, the gilded owl called out my name, his voice so familiar, his eyes dark and sad. ___ did you even notice I disappeared? Gesso Cocteau 2025
Dark Bird
Dark Bird Why do we reduce reality to one octave,to simplify, to survive?The magnum opus hums just beyond reachof the dark bird’s wingbeat, a secret fracturing the air. The universe sings in undertones,notes lost in the stillness of cravingyet we long for ____something small enough to hold,to press against our soulwhen the silence grows too loud. But the poet knows ____truth lives in the marrow of darkness,in the animal lust of want.To write is to descend,to press a hand to the pulse of shadow,where hunger is raw and unspoken. Underneath, desire is an echo,a body remembering itself,flesh yearning for the myth of touch,primal, unfiltered,like the first fire licking the cave walls,like the stillness before a name is given. We forget the wind carries secrets,that roots hum beneath the soil,that light itself is a chorusspilling gold into morning. But we choose the known,a scale we can master,a pattern we can repeat,fearing the infinite songthat might undo us. And yet,in the pause between heartbeats,in the quiet before ____ the dark bird sings,in the spaces where the music falters,something lingers,an undertone,a world ____waiting. © Gesso Cocteau