Optimistic Nihilism

By Marilyn Sieger

I am alive in the springtime

awake with the awareness of

eye-bulging simplicity:

One day the planet earth will

E X

P L O D E !

If you’re unlike me and this doesn’t

fill you with peaceful glee in the

mortality of human momentary allow me

to explain the ephemeral; allow me to

d e c o n s t r u c t .

Someday at some point

in a future near or far

there will be an End.

The sun will expand and then consume

and nothing or nobody will be here

(or anywhere)

to Remember.

Isn’t that the scary part?

Eighty-or-so spins around the sun

and we spend them wondering

what the world thinks when in reality

we will fall into the mandalas of oblivion like dripping paint -

At this point I’m saying

who gives a damn?

I’m saying, hell yeah, dye your hair

hot pink on a Tuesday

because we’re all dying anyway.

I’m saying, hell yeah, belt the words

of a song because the silence will

I’m saying, hell yeah, take a stupid chance

if that means you find meaning in your meaningless;

it’s a miracle we’re all alive at the same moment, isn’t it?

I’m saying, everything is fake besides happiness

and the sun.

The world is held in the fists of breakers and

Time is on fire;

We only have enough to dance to one more song.

So dance damn it! Why be anything

but our own skins. Why be unhappy

when you could sing. Why be dead

when we’re only alive for a moment, a breath.

Marilyn Sieger is a writer from Arcadia University.