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
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The Intelligence of Silence
The Intelligence in Silence "I stopped performing for the light and started eating the dark. It turns out, hunger isn't a weakness—it’s an initiation." I did not fall.I wanted to know.The surface world was thin polite light, curated smiles,rooms arranged for approval.I could feel something beneath itlike a pulse under marble.So I went down.Not dragged.Not tricked.Drawn.The wheat parted around my bodyas if I were returning to somethingolder than memory.Gold against my cheek.Dry stalks whisperingthis is where the roots speak.The pages pinned behind me,fragments of script, abandoned drafts,ink pressed into paper like breath into skin ,were not relics.They were versions of methat stopped halfway.I lay among themand let the ravens come.They did not circle.They landed.Black weight on my shoulder,sharp intelligence against my throat.One pressed its beakto the soft place below my collarboneand asked without sound:How far will you go?I answered by eating.The fruit was not sweetness.It was density.It was heat.It was the sudden awarenessthat hunger is not weakness,it is the mind entering the body.The red on my mouthwas knowledge passing through flesh.I wanted to know what desire iswhen it is not edited for someone else.When it is not shaped for applause.When it is not restrained into virtue.In the underworldnothing flatters you.Nothing performs for you.There, shadow does not accuse.It reveals.I met my animus there,not as a man,but as iron in my spine,as the unflinching voice that said:Take up your own depth.Do not borrow power.Generate it.I lay in sacred alonenessuntil solitude stopped feeling like exileand began to feel like initiation.The ravens did not leave.They became language.The wheat did not wither.It rooted in my body.I will carry the underworld in my mouthlike a secret lover,and nothing that touches mewill remain untouched. Poetry and Image © Gesso Cocteau
Where the Body Thinks and the Soul Takes Form
I have never experienced sculpture and poetry as separate disciplines.They are two expressions of the same act of attention. My sculptures begin as observations of the human condition, not as it is performed, but as it is lived. The quiet lean of one body toward another. The tension between longing and restraint. The moment where love steadies us or undoes us. I am less interested in spectacle than in recognition: the instant when someone sees themselves inside a form and feels understood without explanation. Sculpture, for me, is a language of the body.Poetry is the same language, spoken inward. When I sculpt, I am listening with my hands. Bronze carries memory. It holds weight, resistance, gravity, just as we do. The human figure becomes a site of inquiry: how we endure, how we reach, how we protect ourselves, how we surrender. The surface matters, but what lives beneath the surface matters more. What is unspoken. What is held. My poetry often arrives after the sculpture, as if the work has loosened something that needs words. Other times, the poem comes first, a line, an image, a truth that insists on being felt before it can be seen. In those moments, the sculpture follows the poem like a body following breath. Each informs the other. Each sharpens the question. There is a conversation constantly unfolding between these two forms.The sculpture teaches the poem about silence.The poem teaches the sculpture about vulnerability. I think of my work, whether cast in bronze or written in lines, as acts of witnessing. To love is to witness. To create is to witness. To stand still long enough for the moment to speak. I am drawn to themes of devotion, resilience, sensuality, and the unguarded spaces between people. The human condition is not abstract to me, it is intimate. It lives in posture, in proximity, in the way two figures can hold an entire history without narrative. My figures are often grounded, rooted to the earth, because love is not an idea, it is something we carry in our bodies. Over time, I have come to understand that my sculptures are poems that refuse to speak, and my poems are sculptures that refuse to stand still. They exist in a shared field of meaning, each one asking the same essential questions: How do we live inside love?How do we survive longing?What does it mean to remain open in a world that asks us to close? The image accompanying this piece captures me as I am most often found, observing, listening, inhabiting the space between thought and form. It is there, in that in-between, where my work lives. Art, for me, is not about answers.It is about staying with the questionand allowing it to take shape. Gesso CocteauSculptor & Poet
Before the Bronze: The Shape of Forever
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.