Mona Lisa
You, “the ideal woman.”
You are beautiful. Mysterious...
“Just out of reach.”
The ideal woman; a masterpiece.
Enigmatic. Priceless.
Best of all?
You are silent.
You sit there, and you smile.
You are what everyone wants you to be.
Mona Lisa, you are everything.
You are ”the best known,
the most visited,
the most written about,
the most sung about,
and the most parodied
work of art in the world.”
Thank you, Google.
Mona Lisa,
you are what everyone wants you to be.
They don’t even know your name,
Lisa Gherardini, or del Giocondo, or da Vinci. No.
Muse, wife, or mistress,
or self-portrait re-envisioned.
You were created in 1503,
or was it ‘19?
You are 16 years unaccounted for.
You are everywhere, and everything.
So, why are we drawing blanks?
You, woman immortalized.
You, loneliness personified.
You sit there and you look amused.
Everyone gives you their stories.
and you take our load.
You sit there and you pose for all the men,
all the women.
You let them project their dreams,
their insecurities, their misnomers, their lives
onto you.
What do we say about the person who decides you are the best?
Why does he take all that he sees,
just the image of you,
and think he is worthy of saying anything?
Why should she be able to stain your persona
with her assumptions?
What does she know of you, really?
When will we focus on the perpetrator
and not the portrait?
We label you and love you and loathe you
at the same time, Mona Lisa.
How simple your life must be,
to sit behind bulletproof glass
and know that you are untouchable.
You are what everyone wants to be.
Aren’t I Mona Lisa?
Aren’t you?
And you have it worse, Mona Lisa,
because you have nothing to say.
Nothing you can say.
I mean, you’re a painting.
You are brush and stroke.
You are an impression on a canvas.
You are made solely of the other.
But we aren’t so different there, either.
We are all conglomerates of the images
others have sculpted for us.
We are all shaped by
the hands of another.
We are all Mona Lisa.
Even you. Even me.
And it will always happen to us.
Even as we sit.
Even as we stare,
and say nothing.
