The Smoking Priest

I am a smoking priest. I proffer my body up as a temple within where to burn the sacrificial fires and let the smoke rise to the heavens. The smoke heavily scented by the burning embers burns blue, the true colour of heat and envy. Let it rise a signal fire to be seen anon far, for the few true believer who dwell in the countryside. Let them glimpse it through the refined gaze of my looking glasses perched upon my nose.
Through this my mocking shroud and down the nary traveled path into the bursting capillary rot that is my soul. Therein lays my life of deception. In fourteen-hundred and ninety three the devil bid you dance with thee and in this slavers merriment stared my vacant orbs lament. I did this to you and you to me out upon the papal see. And from that time to this the nature of my predation was always the conquest of your faith. You may ask if I ever believed in God, but in a glance you already know.
For in glances only are we allowed to believe in the great Almighty, one day, we are atheists for the smoke has not risen and consumed the fires within, billowing in and around like some ancient ancient and vengeful deity, angry with the fact that we have forsaken him. Yes, I believe in God, but His aspect changes daily, on an hour to hour basis. I see him standing upon a street corner smoking a pipe with a listless insouciance that borders upon apathy just before he vanishes behind the oncoming streetcar, not to be seen again until next Thursday, when I have forgotten my vows, so far from Sundays and I see him again in the crossed legs of the plaid skirted woman so far from my consuming hands on the other side of the train. Yes, He is all around us, in our blood, our fiery blood and in our serene pacification, like the venerable gods of the Babylonians and Assyrians and Egyptians, slipping into an unknown and unknowable silent fate. They rage within the fires within our souls yet, though. I light the candles every night. God, shut out the black. God, cut off the black parts.
I gathered succour in the forgiveness, the good grace of my lord, the very grace of my virtue. My lord you see is that virtue: that which I have gathered like the wealth of a noble, in my own greatness I grant absolution. Take comfort in this fact. With the advent of catholicism, the singular and universal faith, the one Church, the fallen one- third of the holy host reigns victorious here in the temporal realm of Satan, and proudly (and defiantly) I count myself as one. You are absolved of your sin in this world by the forsaken servants of God, aren’t you happy, don’t you feel better?
You should after all, after all a forgotten servant and fallen one deserves himself to be heard as well. Do you hear me, ancient ones, young ones? For you dwell within my heart, like djinnis within a bottle. When I had touched her breast I felt the smoke begin to rise and I parted in the wind, torn apart by the stronger, more decisive tack of the current of the day. The Day, this Day, we have seated ourselves here to redress the sins that are borne with us from our very day of birth. Afterwards, I took her hand. I took her hand and with everything else within it. Sin, doubt, repression, fear and death.
She opened her hand, it spilled into mine and became my possession as well. I seek my gods in the winds now. Azrael, come visit me. I have been granted the gifts of the prince of the air, I have been staid that constant stench of the putrefied flesh in this moment the stench of my living atrophy. I have been dying for millennia and also very alive. My presence is seen all about you, I am the living embodiment of the shadow of darkness, I am THE smoking priest.