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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
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 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
At the Edge of Fall
At the Edge of Fall This is the time when leaves surrender slowly. How beautiful it is to let things go. The air carries a transient light that gilds the darkening sky reminding me of when I was young, standing at the edge of fall. The elements are swirling together, invisible and weightless ____ a sign of restlessness. Today, I was thinking about you, how you felt beneath my hands like the colors of autumn, amber and gold. (You were like the impending winter ____ a note of bittersweet) When I first sat at the piano I thought I was in love. I bled dark keys into melodies trying to find your heart. The wild black crow you gave to me has never left my side, you said he was a symbol of my darkness and my dreams. And the fire of my youth burned fierce and wild. The ache of your absence remainswoven into the fabric of my being. ____ It seems like a thousand years ago but I can still feel you next to me. (this is the force of destiny) Now ____ your death reminds me of this time of year. I still miss your voice, the way you spoke my name. The way you looked at me from across the room. This is a testament to you, to love and to those rare moments that slip through time. I will always be the unfinished poem waiting for you, standing at the edge of fall. © Gesso Cocteau
The Fallen Tree
The Fallen TreeThe tree had fallen,there was no sign of conflictno sign of struggle,just the roots separatedfrom the groundas though itsomehow knewit did not exclusivelybelong to this earth.It looked at mefrom eyes tangled deepwithin the quiet of its husk.Its soul was beginning to wanderand the bird who knew this treebecame a witness to its death.(in-between the silence and the grave)Secretsgrounded into shadowsand my desire for youstill feels like sandpaper upon my tongue,____ vampires in my soul.(Sorrow is not translatable)So, you said you wanted meto write you a poem,it’s harder than I thought it would be.Sometimes I feel likethat fallen tree.The birds camethey had no messagesonly feathers, eyes and mythology.The Raven lingeredabove the dying woodstarring into the voidas I wrote this poem.Sometimes things end as they should ____this is my poem for you. © Gesso Cocteau
Imagination
Imagination “If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.” – Émile Zola Imagination is the light that gives passion to our lives. To imagine is to lift ourselves beyond the constraints of the mundane and into the world we dream and imagine. As children, we fly on the wings of our dreams, unburdened by the weight of reality. In childhood, imagination is the key to looking at things differently. When we are young, we have a natural love for daydreaming. Pablo Picasso wrote, “Every child is an artist; the problem is staying an artist when you grow up.” Creativity blooms from the fertile soil of imagination, implanting originality into our actions. It’s the fresh blood flowing in our veins, invigorating every endeavor with uniqueness. Imagination pulls people out of the depths of depression and psychological distress by removing the fear factor. It changes our perspective, infusing life with hope and possibility. The freedom of expression in our dream world cultivates a positive attitude. Imagination allows us to explore and express without bounds, nurturing a sense of joy and optimism. The great artist poet William Blake wrote, “The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.” When you nurture your imagination, you hold the universe in your hands. Dream and let your imagination take flight, explore realms beyond the ordinary. Remember, we are what we think about ourselves, and whatever we can imagine holds the potential to become reality one day. Imagination is brilliance playing without any rules! Be a dreamer. Let your imagination soar, chase the shadows it casts on the earth. Always remember “the most beautiful things we can experience is the mysterious.” Imagination is magic! © Gesso Cocteau