Stalking Butler

He is always ready to serve me, he is always waiting, by my bedside he stands true.

Stalking Butler
By Keaton Foster

“When what’s real becomes dictated by what’s made up.”


Is this real?

Oh, how I ponder. Is this the purest kind of madness? Is this something from my mind or from my ever-deepening soul? Is this here to help me or to obliterate me? I simply don’t know. Obfuscation fills my lungs, saturating my mind. Each new day that I face, it finds me. Always it stands by the side of my old wooden bed with its hands cupped like a bowl, and inside that bowl, words, ideas, mental constructs float around, stewing.

Like a servant, like a subordinate, like a man with only one purpose, he offers to do things for me. Always he demands to show me all that he has, all that he is capable of. His service, his patronage, his power to render things is without question incomparable. If I’m the writer, then he is the master of every idea I express.

Upon a crooked shelf near my old wooden bed sits a broken clock. The second hand does not move; only the hours creep along. Next to that clock is a small, hand-carved wooden box. My name is scrawled upon the lid. Inside, there is nothing—a void screaming to be filled. Someday I will reside within the confines of that box, bound by its sides and tied to what it means to be there. There is room only for me, a fact that I’m quite sure he knows and possibly resents.

Again and again, he comes, like a stalking butler bringing me what I need: food for thought and a copious amount of ideas to brood upon.

He offers me a caustic amalgamation of rhetoric, all meant to make me question everything I see and all that I claim to know. He feeds my ravenous brain at the expense of his own. He always shows me more than I wish to see, and I’m sure that such a relationship is harmful for both of us. But regardless, it continues. Sacred is our need.

He always takes me to the edge. Peering into an ever-darkening abyss, I understand that he is always ready to push me over if required. He is certainly not afraid of the impact, but there is no doubt that I should be. He has always been unconcerned with me. Self-service does not apply; this is about serving me up to the world we currently share.

This place, this seeming abyss, is a prison for my mind within a prison of time. Without question, it would not be impossible to escape. Many monumental doors stand in my way. There are no keys because there are no locks. To open any one of them would take every being alive—a unified front against reality, defined by everyone and everything but him and me. Such a definition is the hallmark of our species.

He, my stalking butler, shows me the world, and I show it to others with my words, cramming it down their throats, screaming, "Suffocate or survive." Either way, without question, you will somehow, someway, be changed. I know that I will only stop when the insatiable appetite of humankind is satisfied, and when all else feels unlike before. Only then will I have served humankind as well as he has served me.

Like a stalking butler, he brings me what I need even if no one is asking. Fastidiously, I work on each detail without regard for the impact it has on this life I am fighting to live. There can be nothing less than everything I’m capable of. Both he and I are undoubtedly meant to share with a world full of people who are, for the most part, unaware.



*Stalking Butler*
*Written by Keaton Foster © 2015.*