True Love

True Love

by Gesso Cocteau in Blog

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 lips
they 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 way
your hands erase
the boundary of my skin.

We are already myth,
two bodies forged
in the same crucible of need,
the same molten breath
that shaped the stars.

You lift me into you
as if gravity were only a rumor
told by those
who have never touched eternity.

Kiss me,
and let death
find us fused,
still burning.

 

Poetry and Image© Gesso Cocteau

Tags: #gessococteau #gessococteaublog #gessococteaujeancocteau #gessococteaupoetry #gessococteausculpture #poetryofgessococteau #strandedheartsgessococteau #strandedheartsgessococteau #gessococteaupeteberg #Lovepoetrygessococteau #gessococteaulovepoetry #lostlovepoetrygessococteau # @gessococteausongofdesire

Related Posts

The Scent of Jasmine and Ash

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

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

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    

Leave a comment

Please note, comments need to be approved before they are published.

Our Favorite Galleries

Our Favorite Galleries

Policies

Policies

Instagram icon

gessococteau.store
Instagram icon
Home Search Cart Products About