MY HUSBAND
I live everyday
with the taste of him
upon my flesh.
His scent and his voice
whisper to me throughout the day,
and when we stand together
our shadow is one.
I love him because he is rare,
because he kisses me until the sun comes up
and because he is dangerous and impossible
because I never want to wake up
from this dream without him.
Excerpt from the poem
‘My Husband’
2024 Gesso Cocteau©
In the language of clay, love is never still,it keeps forming us, endlessly, into Forever. Forever (for the Viking) In the beginning, there was only clay and breath,the quiet surrender between two forms learning how to be one.Every curve, every reach, remembers touch,not the touch that ends, but the kind that begins againeach time one heart leans toward another. I call this Forever because it carries the weight of love that has no edge,no border between body and spirit, giver and receiver.It is the moment before bronze,when the pulse of creation is still visible,alive beneath the fingertips that shaped it. Here, they stand,not as man and woman, not even as figures,but as the echo of devotion itself.A reminder that love is never still;it keeps forming us, over and over,until we recognize ourselvesin the arms of another. — Gesso Cocteau This is Forever in the foundry completed in clay and before the mold is made. I will post the piece when it is completed in Bronze.
True Love “Make me immortal with a kiss.” — Christopher Marlowe There are moments as an artist when creation feels less like invention and more like revelation, as if the piece already exists in another realm and you are simply the vessel pulling it through.True Love came to me in such a way. Two forms entwined, not just in body, but in essence, suspended, weightless, eternal.I thought of the Marlowe line: “Make me immortal with a kiss.”And I understood.Some kisses are not between lipsthey are between lifetimes.I wrote this poem as an invocation of that fire. True Love (for Carl) Make me immortal,not with words,but with the wayyour hands erasethe boundary of my skin.We are already myth,two bodies forgedin the same crucible of need,the same molten breaththat shaped the stars.You lift me into youas if gravity were only a rumortold by thosewho have never touched eternity.Kiss me,and let deathfind us fused,still burning. Poetry and Image© Gesso Cocteau
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
