The title names a toy, but the poem never does. "El yoyo" is the only place the object appears, and the body of the text, written in English, leaves the reader to work out the rest. Even that small gap between title and text is a kind of return, since you have to go back up to the title to understand what the lines are about. The poem takes the yo-yo as an image of memory: something we send away and reel back in, over and over, until we can't tell whether we are playing with it or it is playing with us.
The opening stanza already behaves like the toy. "We come back / to ourselves / again" can describe a yo-yo returning to the hand, or a person returning to who they were. The next stanza stutters: "and again / and again and / again". A line ending on a bare "and" hangs in the air, waiting for the next line to catch it. The poem is built from ten tercets with short lines and no end rhyme, so its music comes from repetition and from where the lines break. Sentences spill across stanza gaps ("remember // it as adults then come // back"), and the white space works like the drop of the string. The reader falls through it and is pulled up again by the next line. "Back" is then followed immediately by "up and down", so the line break and the meaning move together.
"The thread / hangs." is the first firm full stop, and the verb is worth pausing on. A yo-yo hangs at the bottom of its fall, but the word also carries a faint unease, as if the thread might be a noose or an unresolved question. The poem stays at that suspended point just long enough for the mood to change.
From there it turns from a shared "we" to "some". "Some took it / quite seriously: / competed // in shopping malls". The colon sets up a verdict, and the verdict is harsh. "Nature less, / neutered" can be read as "natureless", meaning a toy cut off from outdoor play, or as "nature, less", meaning a diminished version of it. Either way, the hard repeated *n* sounds make the phrase clipped and clinical, and "neutered" suggests something tamed and made harmless. Then comes "amplified quite loudly / by marketers", with the longest line in the poem swelling to match what it describes. The word "quite" appeared two stanzas earlier in "quite seriously", and its dry, slightly British-sounding understatement makes both the competitors and the advertisers look faintly ridiculous. The parenthetical "(sold-out)" finishes the thought in a murmur. It can mean the stock is gone, or it can mean someone has betrayed their principles. The loud marketing is answered by a quiet aside in brackets.
The ending is where the poem really argues with itself. "Memories / can define / you-" breaks off at a dash, as if the sentence has lost its nerve. What follows, "don't need to / go back / there", reuses the word "back" that opened the poem as a gentle, almost inevitable motion. Now it is something to refuse. The "we" of the beginning has become a "you", so the voice may be addressing the reader or talking to itself. And "there" is left open. It could be childhood, the mall, or the memory itself. There is no final punctuation, so the poem ends without a full stop, unlike "hangs." earlier. The thread is left dangling.
The poem is slight in size but its construction is careful. It shows how a private memory (a child's toy) can be turned into a public product, and how nostalgia can feel like our own while being sold back to us. It also refuses a comfortable conclusion. It lets the pull of the past be strong and natural, then pulls the other way. The form carries that tension too: a poem built on returning that ends by saying you needn't return, and cannot quite finish its own sentence.