He’s got the gun, the looks and license to kill. He’s everybody’s favorite 007 agent, and you just know that he has to be incredibly stupid, crazy or optimistic to face the same psychotic villains day in and day out. He’s my hero, but I’ll never understand how his brain works.

Bond, James Bond

He’s a little looser

With every martini—

Shaken, not stirred

—Until those blurred definitions

Dawn on him with a sickening certainty.

Now, on a balcony,

On another exotic island,

In the arms of another beautiful woman,

While the sun sets over the ocean,

Picturesque and dull,

He admits to her

The mistake of every assumption.

That skill, so prized and respected,

Is half-luck,

He knows, and half-fate.

Every time he dances with death,

Dodging bullets, flipping cars, blowing up buildings,

He admits that it’s not so much courage as—

Well, something else.

Never mind what.

Something suicidal, no doubt.

No, not that, so much—the opposite, really.

The part of him that knows he’d always survive.

Live to die another day.

The eternal, jaded optimist in him

That never fails and—

Somehow

—is never wrong.