Giannina Braschi - Yo-Yo Boing!

— Here , said he, is your card .

— Did you take it?

— Of course I did. Look. He fooled me. I believed that those were pearls that were his eyes. I had a terrible cold. Now I cough like I have done all the way up to here. The cough I hear when I cough is a thunderbolt. A snowball. And the phlegm. It clears my throat to cough.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyant,

had a bad cold.

So you can imagine how her voice sounded.

Nevertheless

is known to be the wisest woman in Europe

with a wicked pack of cards.

She’s a witch, don’t you see, she could be one of the witches in Macbeth.

Double Double Cauldron Trouble

Trouble is bubbling. Watch out. The witches of Oz, and Jabalí is roaring his throat, ahem:

With a wicked pack of cards.

— So, why did you succumb to the cough, or to the wicked deck of cards, when they were shuffled, you should have known, what they meant, when she said:

Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,

The lady of situations.

That’s you, my darling. She was beckoning you.

— Don’t point at me.

— It was fire that she wanted.

— And fire she got.

— Fire, Mona, fire.

— Doubled the flames of seven branched candelabra.

— And I was demented. The wicked pack of cards continued shuffling.

Here, is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel.

That drove me nuts. To hear that the wheel was roaring its klaxons. Blowing its horn. Oh, my God, what do I do now? How can I survive this devastation of my whole being? Where am I going to be tomorrow? How can I prove my point if I have no point? Not that I had a point before. But at least, you know what I mean, I knew where I was going. How much longer will I have to suffer the consequences? What you did to so-and-so still resonates in my contradiction. Maybe I’m just some critter feeding off a vegetable like you, but you didn’t contradict me when I said it — you didn’t object with your own contradiction — my reply flew by our daily bread without a single objection until it stopped here, where they objected with all sorts of ifs and buts — but your contradiction resounded like a bullhorn in a diaphragm of sounds — in your reply was all the bicker and bite that’s been hounding me ever since. I don’t want to know anything about you. But by not wanting to know anything about you, I’m denying myself a part of me that is yours, yours alone, and that’s buried in the depths of my ignorance. I’m leaving. How can I leave my melancholy behind? You say nurture what grows outward and bury what grows inward. And what’s already buried — I ask myself — is it dead or just buried because I don’t want to see it — I throw dirt on it so it will die once and for all — but it keeps throbbing like a heart in love and beating sublime notes and even though it’s buried because I didn’t want it to show, it grumbled, groaned, pushed up a mountain and erupted with all the might and glory of a volcano. I’ve tried to kill you by burying you alive, and for a while there I stopped thinking about you because I thought you were dead. You had left me in complete darkness, with no trace of those white lights circling the halo or the crown of laurels on my head — no traces of them or those names that used to possess me. Then idle fame came, which always comes when adjectives feel emptiest, and without a sound it pointed out my name. And then you came back with a nobler name to sit on my name and to name me with other names and addresses. I want you to know I never left you. I always saved a place for your name in case you ever wanted to possess me again, and I’m sure that after possessing them the way you possessed me, you were thinking of possessing me again the way you possessed them because having possessed them after having left me, you would possess them with my emptiness, and then me, with all their winds and memories. And now that you settle me, possess me, point me out with five fingers, and kiss me with five mouths like fish, you won’t leave me, not even for a second, and I don’t mind having you around because I like to take what you say and write it my own way, interpreting it in the style and shape you give it. Oh, let’s stop idealizing and romanticizing. It would’ve been nice to know where you were, and how you got in, and whether it was me who threw you out of the house, of course it was me because I was sick ’n tired of being misunderstood, of being told I might as well be speaking Chinese when I write. I wanted to make sense. I wanted to feel the common denominator. You never really left me. You acted as if you were gone and made me feel your absence. Oh boy, did I feel abandoned. Some people think you’re too subjective — and that’s why they bury you alive — to see if you’ll die of grief and leave. And some even say you’re bad luck. But to me, you’re the greatest woman alive, the most beautiful man of all, you’re my poetry. You wake me up when I have to get up and put me to bed when I have to sleep. But you don’t give me what I want. You always give me something, but I can’t say what you give me because you don’t give me what I want. I don’t want what I want. I want what I want. I don’t know how to ask for what I want. I know I’m missing something — something is missing. I know there is a rocket packed like a pill — and no one is going to make me swallow that pill — it goes down the hatch like a rocket through space — I know where it’s supposed to go, but it’s lost in outer space — it lost its way without a trace, round and round the dial goes, where it’ll stop nobody knows, blasting past the speed of light, blasting sticks of dynamite, blasting away all the lies, burning them to crispy little fries in an itty-bitty vat of big fat lies — liar, liar, pants on fire — all your plots have gone haywire — all your schemes have backfired — tumbling into the quagmire of a bottomless pit, without a backbone, sounds of the hounds of the tongue, and the lochs of the tongue, empty, full, rife with life — so to speak — with a couple of kisses on the forehead and one on the cheek, which makes three altogether leading to four, a kiss on the behind, the cheek backdoor, where a blast of cold water up the ass knocks a couple of men flat on their ass, flat, but not dead because they live for the blast of ten shots of sherry down the hatch, galloping faster and faster with Rocinante and Clarín, the court jester and the king of laughter, at last, I say nothing against the here-ever-after — I want to laugh until I cry and my tears run dry because my tears are the same whether I laugh or cry, but my words are different every time I fall on my ass and write from behind, frontward or backward, left or right, all that matters is how you did it and whether it did it right and whether it ever reached the tip-top or the rock bottom, assuming that there was rock at the bottom, maybe there was nothing at the bottom, maybe all the bottoms were falling for nothing because there was nothing to fall for — they were free-falling over nothing and they were to free to fall freely into this free-for-all — all for nothing — and some of them thought they’d eventually get to the bottom of it if they keep plunging deeper and deeper into the bottomless pit where there was nothing to fall on except their asses and their faces — they’re up to their asses and faces in bottomless pits and they’re squealing with laughter as they come tumbling down like cartoons from the stars and they’re laughing at those twinkle, twinkle, little stars, flickering like swarms of fireflies, like little diamonds in the sky and they’re magically turning shitgreen like hotshit, I swear I was falling on my ass in this bottomless pit of jinglebells and dingle-berries when suddenly I flipped back over, or onto my right side, it doesn’t really matter which side because the right is to the left of the right where the left is writing what the right was just saying because both sides are falling on their asses at the same time because they’re both writing with the same tongue, left or right, against the grain of Christianity, backwards, I swear I was falling on my ass, when suddenly I pulled a tongue out of my ass, as if my ass had a tongue to thrust in and out, thrusting in and out where my ass kept falling on its ass, it kept thrusting in and out, in and out, forwards and backwards, faster and faster — first one there wins the race — last one there’s a rotten egg!