Abe: I’m lonely, tired; don’t want to die alone.

God: You’re crazy. You can’t tell what’s real.

Abe: Every wife was a daydream. Every success
just some kind of dress-up playtime afternoon.

God: You can’t talk in the mystic. There’s no words
here.

Abe: Too soon old; too late wise.
Too far afield; a horse collapses
into tall meadow grasses as short-lived
hoppers thwack triumphantly on all sides,
not guessing the impending dissolution
of their flimsy segmented
hard-skinned, sloshy-gutted bodies.

God: You can’t feel in the mystery.
The mystic’s before ideals and feels.
You cannot mope around inside Pure Love.

Abe: I thought I could feel my way
from inside out. To wisdom, health
and even as wide as a nation, as commonwealth.
But I can only watch as the Fates
absentmindedly turn me off,
one switch-flip at a time.

God: You don’t know what’s going on
And the mystic’s no place to discover
details
like
if so and so likes you,
if your planet survives,
if the weather improves.

Abe: I need someone to talk to, someone
who believes the things I say, someone
who forgives the lines I draw without pretending they never happened.
The mystic’s too lonely when you’ve so little faith.

God: Oh ye of little faith!
Why don’t you melt yourself
down into the formless explosion at the core of everything,
a-shining bright out every moment.
Right there in your own consciousness
is the nothing that’s everything, is
the Love
that swamps all like a Light so bright it burns through every edge, every boundary, ever particular —
the Love
that’s All.

Abe: I don’t find It. I grow sleepy.
I don’t want It. I just want a wife
and a safe place to hide with her —
to shelter with her out of the hurly-burly,
away from the crime, apart the lie.

God: You’ll have to shift your expectations.
You’ll have to prefer heaven to earth.
You’ll have to choose Love over touch.

Abe: A wooden sailing ship drifting farther and farther
from course; her crew less and less
interested in their journey, more and more
resigned to fading drying out settling down
as parched white bones
on a deck of fallen planks
on a ship who glides
forever to the edge of the sea
and then forever totters
over those falls
from which no knowledge returns.