Symphony of Rats inspired me with its chaos that operates within its own logic and speaks its own language. I created multiple poems and a collage in response. What felt most true to the experience of the show is this poem written in the form of a cento. I gave Beat Poets the mic to create a world that spills from the page into another sideways reality that stomps its foot at us and demands that we believe.

Unimpeachable Prezi-dent of the Pepsodent Universe

Inspired by Symphony of Rats

by Sandra Crouch 

Inspired by Symphony of Rats


O glorious muse that bore me from the womb,
          {this interjurisdictional headquarters}
Think it's all a dream!

What is this Universe but a lot of waves
thundering from my floor to heaven
heavier than a volcano at night in Mexico!

One must see the Great Man
and the Emperor's white page
and the last of the Bulls—

Let elevators creak and speak,
ascending and descending in awe—
delicate steelwork of unfinished skyscrapers

leading nowhere—Zipzap—the cars
and the lights from little tinkly Washington St.
The whole populace fed by News.

Old moon my eyes are now New Moon With Human Footprint
Who's ever going to know the world before it goes?
Beyond my remembrance! Incapable to guess!

Not merely the yellow skull pounding
bitter lemon wind over sheaves of rock—
Look at that motherfucking smokestack!

O Lord burn me out of existence.
Sitting here in limbo—
there are people walking through my head

hearing the marvelous strange chime
with its blunt cornucopias and horn—
the patience of small lawns, small hedges.

O foot tired in climes so mysterious,
Napoleon Buddha pacing will find heaven in hell!
I wake up in the morning with a dream in my eyes:

America, after all
it is you and I who are perfect
not the next world.

Old words echoing what the physical can't—
O Harpo! When did you seem like an angel?
God's only way of building the rickety structure of Time.

—I clearly saw the skeleton underneath
some primordial woman
sunk underground—

Keep the physical literal
The simple division of a ditch between people
In use of words—use words!

O Mercy, Destroyer of the World,
O Mercy, Creator of Breasted Illusions,
O Mercy, Cacophonous Warmouthed Dovely

Come like the Lion coming into the room with two heads—
We'll all end up in heaven anyway,
together in that Golden Eternal Bliss.

Come on home, brother!
Bring me home
to the Eternal Mother—

Holy the lone juggernaut!
Holy the vast lamb of the middle class!
Holy the crazy shepherds of rebellion!


About 
Sandra Crouch
Sandra Crouch, MA, is thrilled to be an Artwire Fellow. She is a poet, floral designer, and multi-genre artist living in Nashville. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Anacapa Review, Jet Fuel Review, Nimrod, Rogue Agent, Rust+Moth, SWING, SWWIM, and elsewhere. Sandra speaks fluent Flower, basic Czech, and is at currently at work on her Southern accent and her first poetry collection. You can read more work at https://sandracrouch.com.
OZ Arts Nashville presents Art Wire: an ongoing collaboration between OZ Arts and The Porch in which 10 writers attend the OZ Arts performance season and respond to the presentations through original writing that is personal, playful, and deeply engaged. The OZ Arts 2019-2020 season offers each Art Wire Fellow a diverse array of inspiration, including innovative Japanese dance artist Hiroaki Umeda; a genre-bending presentation of Frankenstein by Chicago-based company Manual Cinema; and two emotionally raw works with Nashville's own professional dance company, New Dialect, just to name a few.

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