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Overloading the Machine

Fever

the sun sets to the top
of the neighboring Motophoto
and good upper deck people
rejoice

a train whistle in my sink
grins with pride but no teeth
happy like a frat boy
with a blond and a dalmation

the time comes to check the swing
that grin won't last forever
pick up the whistle it's time to sing
a blues in the key of clever.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!--incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who "didn't know what fear was," we ought always to add the flea--and put him at the head of the procession.

-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"