Giannina Braschi - Yo-Yo Boing!

in me only feels good in continual motion — crossing frontiers without settling frontiers — in hotels — where strangers meet without ever meeting — I feel good when I’m lost — that’s the truth — when I’m really lost, I don’t feel lost — I feel the dynamics of my movement or the method of my youth — I don’t cross words with anyone — people disrupt the creative process — sniffing and poking around — coming and going — and leaving — when a passing intuition roams around uncertain — leaving danger and mountains and houses and fountains and restaurants behind — leaving everything behind — and when I leave, I’ll leave you all behind, the way day leaves night when it turns dark, the way night leaves day when it turns light, when a lantern glows in the middle of the night — with the light of my owl eyes — and it’s not that there aren’t any truths or things to believe in, or that I haven’t been chained down myself, it’s just that my being walks around life — like a night watchman — I don’t know what I have to say, I make a mistake, scribble it out, and say it another way — and I still haven’t said what I have to say because I still haven’t voiced the rush I feel when I’m walking — the lack of permanence and instability — the rush to cut the ribbon and rip open the present — not that it’s important or urgent — what’s important is that I continue to leave behind what happens, what has to happen, what should have happened by now, and it lightened the load of my suitcases, the spiritual baggage of my being that sends its being onward with trumpets heralding the season of Advent and the Annunciation, the Coming, and I’ll be right up front when the Coming comes because I went looking for it on my own two legs, and I said goodbye to all the setbacks — how strange, I rose to a higher state of being without elevators, carriers, transitions, or transports — I got

there on my own two feet, with my own two eyes, with my own sixth sense, but I can still feel a knot inside me and that’s why I’m still here writing this — I’ve got to untie it and keep moving — away — from what I’ve stopped loving — what was never mine — when I leave everyone behind with no regrets about leaving them behind — they stayed behind for one reason or another — they must have been taking care of something — some sort of problem that someone left for them to solve — for someone else — not for themselves — for the Coming — because I wouldn’t stay behind even for my own sake because I wouldn’t feel sorry for myself if I were left behind. I flee from roots like a vampire from the cross — and I flee from all sacrificial crosses and from the saying that one nail drives another nail — why not un-nail every nail and Christian Christ from the sacrificial cross, save them from all their sacrifices and say: quit your job, leave home, and walk away from any kind of name that nails you to a sacrifice in the name of the family. That’s why I’ve long been on my way to a far-away place where all that matters is that I’m leaving the place I was born and raised, never to return to the place I first saw lil’ ol’ me in the mirror — and I’m sailing away from what I’m saying in a boat with four paws, paddling to a place that nobody knows, as long as we’re going somewhere and we’ve lost sight of what we left behind — we gave so much importance to what we left behind, and look how small everything looks now that we’ve left it all behind — it keeps getting smaller like when we were children on the verge of adolescence — it was a stormy course and we boarded with suitcases for other ports — as long as there are no frontiers — as long as we don’t know where we’re going — as long as we’re going far, far away — there’s nothing too important to leave

behind on this journey — goodbye to unimaginable frontiers — where the frontier is the only image imaginable because there is nothing suspicious lurking beyond the frontier — so what if there are walls, forts, or bunkers, men of all shapes and sizes, or even vines tying us to the earth — I always look beyond the sea’s horizon, where I want to be, where no one has ever been, the other side of the rainbow, beyond my wildest dreams, dreaming, walking, doing what must be done — and what happens to the man who flies to the sun and goes down in flames or meets the messenger of his destiny, an angel with big wings who carries him like a stork back to the place he was born, grows, and dies, or achieves something during his travels — enduring the journey — with many more rivers, bridges, and chimeras yet to cross — I stop to think about where I came from and which way my thoughts are heading — I’m heading south to the Statue of Liberty to torch my being in the continuous presence that I am and to find my being at peace with my being inside itself, finding myself and being without being or not being everything I am doing today being what I am doing without being a being I am not seeing in my being because it’s not inside me anymore — it left my being — it said goodbye so many times — flying swiftly away on feathered disillusions — as if chased away by guilt — for being without me — if I say I’m in a hurry without it, I mean a hurry-scurry, like here’s your hat where’s your hurry — I’m getting out of here, and I’m leaving because I haven’t finished going once and for all because something or someone comes back searching for a part of my being when I’m about to cross the frontier — I left the keys at home — so what — I’m not planning to come home — you left one of your suitcases — you shouted — so what — if I left it behind it’s because I don’t want to be a card-carrying member of a suitcase committee that never quite leaves the way suitcases do, without hurrying to get lost in customs, without losing face for losing its way, naked impudence of the being that leaves everything without finding anything. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.

If it’s 5 o’clock on Friday — and you’ve had no work to do — and your boss gives you work at 5 o’clock — let him do it, close your desk, turn off your computer — and walk right out. If it oppresses you, ask yourself what oppression means. Isn’t your own destiny oppressing you? Aren’t you aching to accomplish something for yourself? Where are those orders coming from anyway — from your responsibilities to the boss — or from a higher destiny calling you to make something of life? Haven’t you ever felt a calling — in your guts — assuming you have guts — or your lungs — or the twinkle in your eyes — a calling from a higher someone or something more powerful than yourself, telling you to follow it? If not — then what do you have — I ask you — a boss biting and picking on you — day in, day out — take it or leave it. If you let mediocrity oppress you — because you know it’s mediocre and you do nothing against it — you’re doubly oppressed by mediocrity and the boss — and twice as mediocre. And don’t tell me: What am I going to live off — off what? The question is not what are you going to live off — but whether you dare to live. I stay clear of all bosses, and I don’t oppress anybody. People say either you’re above or you’re below, but no, that’s not true, I’m neither above nor below, I’m passing by like the clouds in the sky, the way the sun passes, basking the earth in light every day. If you don’t pass by, if you don’t accept that you’re here passing by, if your being is not, not passing by everything as it moves around, I am here later. Present. When they stifle you, they let you rust, in every way, even if you’re not rusty, you rust, your teeth fall out, your hair falls out, your moment comes, some run, others get to the point, some humor you, others take precautions, others live in terror because the pressure is so great. It’s so easy to say — I am not going to do it — if you’re unemployed — everything unemployed untangles the tangle that doesn’t let you untangle yourself. If they bring you down, put you down, keep you down in a can of sardines — my question is the following — why did you let them pack you into a can of sardines — if you are not a sardine — and your boss and the other sardines who are sardines don’t realize that you are not a sardine? You’ve been so conditioned to act like a sardine — you think your canned existence is your sole existence — and you can’t tell yourself apart from the other sardines that oppress you because you’re all stuck together in one big clump — to save space — canned space — like canned time on the job — whoever works the hardest the fastest earns the most — whoever puts himself under the greatest pressure has the greatest talent to be put down — the more they put you down, the more you let them — and so the tension builds among the canned sardine rats that itch and bite from ugliness, salty and cold, more dead than alive. If you let them pack you into a sardine can, it’s because you are a sardine — just like all the rest — made of salt and oil, scales and tails, slimy and thick. Canned dead fish bring bad luck. They give bad vibes and give you hives. Canned sardines are all the same. They’re just like flies, but at least flies have wings and fly. That’s the problem with you sardines — you let yourselves be canned. You don’t have wings, and you don’t fly or sting. You don’t buzz or bite your boss. You just squirm and pick on your own rot and death. And the root of the problem is that you don’t fly, you don’t walk, you don’t pass by like I pass by — I pass by everything — from an inferior state of squirming like a canned sardine to a superior state of spreading my wings of steel and flying. Why did you leave your life of Bacchus? Why did you change your crown of laurels for a crown of thorns, china for plastic, wings for cans, joy for sadness, life for death? Go ahead and turn, millennium, turn and leave pain behind.