Wake up, wake up, you who wander astray; your religions are no more than ancient stratagems. (1)

Among his verses as well:
The shifts of time, which tear two intimates apart—so judge, my God, between that and me.
You forbade (2) the deliberate shedding of life, yet You Yourself dispatched (3) two angels to seize it.
And You have claimed a second return for those souls—how needless they found both conditions!

He also said:
We laughed, though our laughter was sheer folly; verily the dwellers of the wide earth have every cause to weep.
The days shatter us until we are like glass—yet there is no remelting (4) for us.

He likewise said:
Affairs that sober minds treat lightly, while a youth knows not for whom the doom is decreed:
the Book of Muhammad, the Book of Moses, the Gospel of the son of Mary, and the Psalms.

And he said:
A company declared, “Your Deity has never sent to humankind either its Jesus or Moses; they have merely turned the All-Merciful into a morsel to be devoured and reduced His religion among the people to a mere nāmūs (statute).”

Ibn al-Jawzi and others have cited further passages of his poetry, each piece attesting to his unbelief, moral dissolution, heresy, and misguidance. It is reported that he directed the following be engraved upon his grave:

This is the crime my father perpetrated against me—
I myself perpetrated no crime against anyone.

That is to say, by marrying his mother, his father brought him into this world, and it was on that account that he ended up in the state he did, whereas he had harmed no one with such an offense. All of this amounts to outright disbelief and atheism—may Allah disgrace him.

Some, however, have alleged that he renounced all of this and repented, composing an ode in which he apologized and disavowed every word. It opens:

O You who behold the gnat as it spreads its wings
in the pitch-black darkness of the deepest night