SOON TO BE RELEASED - STRANDED HEARTS
An Anthology of Love Poetry
Written by Gesso Cocteau
Illustrated by Pete Berg
"Now I understand
the secret of redemption,
I will never forget you.
We are forever
stranded hearts _____."
STRANDED HEARTS
Related Posts
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