Shall I Compare Thee to a Michael Bay?

Shall I compare thee to a Michael Bay?

Thou art more lovely than a thousand exploding helicopters,

Your hair cascades down your shoulders with more grace than the blades of those same helicopters as they erupt rapidly out towards the audience,

who respond emitting appreciative oohs and aahs or merely by adjusting their bulky 3D frames over their bulkier thick-rimmed ones and sigh, 

opining to no one in particular that Optimus Prime just isn’t what he used to be,

that he used to stand for something more pure than product placements: overpriced children’s toys stamped out in foreign factories.

But you, dearest, as you sip your Mountain Dew Code Red Zero out of a Starbucks mug,

your hair is above all such pseudo intellectual commentary,

it flashes its sheen as though a team of bepimpled Pixar employees tediously rendered it frame by precious frame on a network of supercomputers,

and then the producers barged in and said it wasn’t good enough,

and so they scrapped all their wire frames and rebuilt them anew and wrote entirely novel physics  engines that might more perfectly model the movements of each strand and resubmitted it,

and the producers still would not be appeased and said it looked “too real” and didn’t “pop,”

and so those Pixar employees, 

tried though they were by the producer's bizarre pleas, 

valued their paychecks and health-care benefits so very dearly that they went back and deleted everything again and visited European museums and bought expensive art books in their gift shops and pondered each page,

shakily smoking the Camel Menthols they thought they had quit for good after college,
ashing them accidentally on the cat,

tried to see what it was in the hair of those innumerable Virgin Marys that made them so pure,

and when they still couldn't puzzle it out hired on idealistic artists who despised commercialism but accepted employment as a means to strip some cash off the companies they despised and repurpose it to fund an exhibition of dead ducklings tattooed with passages from the Book of Mormon and the Qua-ran and for the lawyers who would defend those projects in court despite personally thinking them trash,
(despite not being vegans,
or gluten-free,
or raw foodists,
not even a single goddamned pescetarian among them,)

and who every day literally spat in the faces of those valiant Pixar nerds and said things that might have been ironic like, “Photoshop? You mean like a dark room, no?” in affected French accents,

but the poor geeks could never really be sure what was irony and what was a carefully maintained ignorance of the outside world,

for they still had yet to properly develop their interpersonal skills,

as it said on their biweekly productivity reports,

and so they were constantly on edge and got in fights with their wives and realized,

in the midst of those heated debates,

that the person they loved most in the world did not,

after all,

actually think their goatee was cool,

and then shamefully shaved it off in front of the mirror,

castrating themselves of the only symbol of the testosterone that scorned them in adolescence,

but had bravely returned in their late 30s to produce the patchy grove on their chin,

holding off the tears until they could mix with the shaving cream,

so no one would know,

so they could maintain outwardly to their peers and acquaintances,

that they had not cried at all since high school,

yet they would know the truth,

and they would not get back what they had lost in the process,

indeed, it was all too fitting that the only thing they would have in memoriam of this opprobrious depilation would be those resplendent CGI hairs,

which would, in their consummate perfection,

take on a darker meaning and come to symbolize the loss of innocence that would haunt them at every turn even after post-production was squared away,

because the movie made it big and suddenly full-sized cardboard cut outs of that hair materialized on every street corner and walmart and gas station and youtube ad,

and there was a sequel in the works they heard,

and already talks of a prequel or a spinoff or a tie-in with the new Micheal Bay flick.

This feeling, my love, is something like how I feel about your hair,

how, in viewing its miraculous appearance, I sometimes feel the same existential panic of those hypothetical 3D engineers whose every success was won in the Twilight Zone unbeknownst to them,

(but without even the moralistic questioning monologue of Rod Sterling to explain wherefore their faults had been committed,

for what hubris they had been found guilty in the court of the gods,)

It is as though it was I who was cursed to render your hair again and again after that first fateful glance,

but in my mind’s eye,

and that the universe that produced you and your hair,

bears some resemblance to those aforementioned Hollywood producers,

constantly egging me on to imagineer it to ever more awe-inspiring resolutions,

so that when I see in reality its true aspect I want tear out my mind’s eye,

like some sort of abstract Oedipus,

so that I may never imagine it again,

because I know that even in my own most incredible exultation of that hair I fall short somehow,

and lose the strength even to look you in the eye without weeping in joyful fear,

such that you try to comfort me, rubbing my back and offering me a sip of your ersatz sugar water,

and when I sip it and look into the textured ovoids of your eyes,

I know the same reverence and bliss that the disciples of Christ knew at the first communion,

even though I am not religious,

even though I do not think that there is sufficient historical evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was a real individual,

I feel this deep in my body,

Can you hear it, my sweet?

La-Beouf, La-Beouf, La-Beouf, La-Beouf...

That is the sound of my heart beating warmly in my ears in the spirit of this new revelation, in the spirit of the heretical epiphany of my love for you.

Your personality is OK too.