Being and Nothingness by Gary Beck

Max Klinger
From the Cycle "A life": Back into Nothingness
(Opus VIII, Plate 15/15)

The sins I have committed
hopefully will die with me,
yet if there is an afterlife
where sins are burnt and purged away
I must endure cleansing,
perhaps not as long as others
for I wasn’t the worst,
non-comforting knowledge
that must be reconciled.

I can’t imagine heaven,
Elysian Fields, Edenic dreams,
and if they were real,
they wouldn’t be for me.
If there’s only nothingness
I surely can’t conceive
of the absence of something.
So my remaining option
is to enjoy as much as I can
before the final conclusion.

*****

Gary Beck has spent most of his adult life as a theater director. He has 14 published chapbooks. Feast or Famine and other one act-plays will be published by Wordcatcher Publishing. His original plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanes and Sophocles have been produced Off Broadway. His poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in hundreds of magazines. He lives in New York City.