I have too many beasts to keep in a metal cage

Just like my ideas, locked inside the fleshy, crimped walls of grey matter; beasts overflowing in the metal cage of a destitute circus. A clown rules them both, keeps bringing more and stuffing them in. Lions, zebras, crocodiles, capuchin monkeys and penguins, all raging: fur, claws and teeth dripping from between the bars. The entire animal kingdom packed inside steel, fermenting at the bottom of an endless pit in a soup of neurons and glial cells.

Lion chomping on a gazelle's hind leg, now bony, stained by dry blood. The wound has closed. The lion still clenches his teeth around the bone with a deaf, rhythmic, sickeningly exact clank. She has learnt to live like this. He keeps dreaming of the chunk of juicy, red meat just out of his reach, always opening and closing his powerful jaws, never strongly enough to break the yellowed bone. He has learnt to live like this.

The beasts are silent, sometimes. They scream in unison, a discordant orchestra of agony and defeat, the other times. But the clown has learnt to live like this. Once in a while he takes out a beast, like a claw machine at an arcade. I keep pushing coins in the slot, but the game is rigged, the claw never picks up what I truly want.

It spins two times around its central axis, swings to the left once, to the right twice, back and forth, randomly, finally sitting still for a fraction of a fraction of a second. That is precisely when I try to change its inevitable, predestined course. But the deed is done, and I get the rejects, each and every time. Peeling leather, disconnected chunks of hair, shimmery kitsch glitter, gooey masses of half-chewed information, half-forgotten words and never remembered lines. They're lifeless, empty husks, drained, raisined, animated by chemicals and biological processes, lighting up occasionally, a broken cuckoo clock singing at odd, uneven intervals.

Periodically, something comes over them, like a black storm cloud, a bout of rabies, perhaps, or a randomized group psychosis. Then, they boil with such force that they tip the cage, sending it tumbling, down, or up, or in any direction you please. The clown screeches, scared at first, excited, then, finally, concerned. But the beasts always remain the same in the end. Sure, they are physically in a different place, in a different state of being, but they are the same, nonetheless. It is hard to change the scheme of the entire Universe.

The mass melts together in time, becoming a gelatinous concoction, making room for the clown to bring more, more, always more. And he does, without fail. Every time, he adds to the pile. Some days are more fruitful than others, but he always brings more, without fail, like a farmer on Harvest Day. He picks the apples without looking, excited by the amount, the prospect of wealth and perhaps, even eternal happiness.

The garden is a vast plain of forever. It stretches on and on. The sun drenches it all in yellow, orange, blood-red, black, and yellow again. Fruit trees, pine trees, baobabs, manchineels and Japanese roses, anything you can imagine, really. It's so hard to pick and choose. Choice is a death sentence. It digs a hole in the pit of my stomach and it builds an entire theme park, equipped with a kilometer tall rollercoaster rumbling like a rabid dog on a melting summer high noon. What if the apple is rotten, regardless of its spotless, shimmery emerald-green skin?

Panic washes over me like the black sea spitting putrid algae on the polluted, plastified shore; sand indistinguishable from muddy-brown two-and-a-half-liter beer bottles and royal blue flasks of ordinary sunscreen. It's cold and it's salty and it makes my skin perk up. I'm uncomfortable and I'm frozen. What if the apple two branches to the right was better, sweeter, juicier?

What if? What if? Life is full of what ifs, full to the brim but it's still never enough. I know I can't reap all the fruits of my work. I bite into the apple with an uncertain hunger and its juice spills through the corners of my pursed lips, dripping down my chin, on my neck. Its taste – I can't tell.

Writing is an imperative. I feel this awkward hollowness in myself, in the depths of my abdomen and I feel the urge to write, but the abyss yawns larger and deeper and I feel as if I'm never saying what I truly mean. I feel like I'm always choosing the wrong beasts to release. After all, the clown is forever a clown, no matter how much he wipes his face; the bleach has stained, irreversibly.

A million of thoughts in a tornado inside my head. I only ever manage to catch a few, like in the game show where people put their hands inside a plastic box containing a whirlwind of money and try to catch the most in a limited time. I have no technique and my hand is slow and heavy and tired. The clock is ticking, ever slightly faster.

True meaning and the words spoken are two quantities describing my ideas; two complementary variables. I try so hard to obtain them both but there is a fundamental limit to the accuracy of my measurements. My ideas are at the mercy of the laws of physics, so exact and precise, an ultimatum for reality yet somehow, still so puzzling and inaccessible, unattainable.

But these thoughts are not my own. They're loans from the library that is and was and will be society. They're stolen candies licked with such lust, crushed against rotten molars, only to be inevitably regurgitated, still candy-shaped, back in the wide world.

My thoughts have never truly been my own. Your thoughts are not yours either, especially not now, when you're reading this. And if I'm the one reading this, my thoughts may now be a little more of my own. On loan, still. Forever on loan. Ever since the dawn of the Internet, every thought is merely a permutation of the nearly infinite collection of knowledge gathered by technology like a fair-haired maiden picking flowers in the Swiss Alps, neatly stacking them in her hand-woven wicker basket. Originality has become extinct, largely.

Nevertheless, writing is an imperative. Rearranging humanity's pool of strings of loose words in surprising, locally unique ways is a prosecution and I am the, perhaps unjustly, accused.

...

The clown wraps the beasts picked by the claw machine in translucent, iridescent cellophane, gently tying a pink bow around their necks in moments of divine inspiration.

Then, he carefully places them on an enamelled, shiny, mahogany shelf in the window of my mental antique store. They wait there, but the antique store is closed indefinitely. Sick of their uncertain fate, they pout and bark as tears springing from their torment drip over the edge of the shelf, until the clown has had enough. His ears bloody, eyelids swollen, face puffed from lack of sleep and peace; he's had enough: the antique store is open, enough for the beast-shaped gifts to escape. But their fates are still uncertain. Lost, adopted, brutally murdered, ran over by careless drivers paying too much attention to their lover. Eventually, forever forgotten.