Satan

"Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago--
centuries, ages, eons, ago!--
for you have existed, companionless,
through all the eternities. 

Strange, indeed, that you should
not have suspected that your
universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! 

Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane--
like all dreams: 

a God who could make good children as easily as bad,
yet preferred to
make bad ones;

who could have
made every one of them happy,
yet never made a single happy one;

who made them
prize their bitter
life, yet stingily
cut it short;

who gave his
angels eternal
happiness unearned,
yet required his other
children to earn it; 

who gave his
angels painless
lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries
and maladies
of mind and body;

who mouths justice and invented hell--

mouths mercy and invented hell--

mouths
Golden Rules,
and forgiveness multiplied by
seventy times seven,
and invented hell;

who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns
upon crimes,
yet commits
them all;

who created man without invitation,
then tries to shuffle the responsibility
for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing
it where it belongs, upon himself;

and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness,
invites this poor,
abused slave to worship him!...

"You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. 

You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations
of an imagination that is not
conscious of its freaks--
in a word, that they are a dream,
and you the maker of it. 

The dream-marks are all present;
you should have recognized
them earlier.

"It is true, that which
I have revealed to you;
there is no God,
no universe, no human race,
no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. 

It is all a dream--
a grotesque and foolish dream.
Nothing exists but you. 

And you are but a thought--
a vagrant thought,
a useless thought,
a homeless thought,
wandering forlorn among
the empty eternities!"

He vanished, and left me appalled;
for I knew, and realized,
that all he had said was true.