Beer Money

Let the Beer Money Tango Begin!
A Play Boxed in Four Poetic Voices
by Darryl Price

At the Blue Corner: 1.
Sleeper Agent Man

They say there are mostly creepy things put away in our DNA
closets that haven't come close to seeing their last phoenix days yet.
We're literally time-bombs set to go off at any minute throughout all
eternity.So what's the use of freaking out?The good part of
our so-called mythological beasties is that they are very deeply embedded in
us by now and make only rare appearances in dreams where it's

child's play to cut them in half and send them back to
sleep between the stardust from whence they came. It's no great secret.
We're physically made from the same explosions in laboratories too cosmic to
remember. They are the memory lanes shone on a rubbery synapse somewhere
in the mystical realms of suspended reason. The bad part is that
they may eventually have a few ideas of their own someday away

from us, sort of like the cute and cuddly robots we currently
keep as pets to watch over our music collections are likely to
do. They'll want to know what an answer feels like. Numbers will
seem like a lie told on the ends of so many puppet
strings, like gutted worms hung out to draw in the fish. What
difference does it make? Choose a fish. Any fish. It's all connected.

What do you do after you catch the fish? What comes after
you eat it? Why?And isn't that the universe in a nut
shell? Where's the holy tree even standing? Where are its roots going?
Into what dimension? I'm just saying. We could be supplying the juice
to the whole thing without even knowing it. But even if that's
true I still would embrace its baffling mystery all because of you.


Rounding the Green Corner: 2.
Dip In The Ocean

Anything can happen to us now and probably already did. I mean how
Are we to know? When you are floating in all this green stuff
You become greenish. Your mind tells you to relax and you want to
Take its advice. But you are no longer in charge of things. You
Rise and fall without asking yourself to. You sink and sputter and sail
On to get a better look at something you all of a sudden
can't name. And fear swims everywhere around you. It takes the shape of
Shadows you can only imagine. But then something else kicks in. A kind
Of resignation to the facts at hand. You simply begin to be part
Of the breadth. Its heart is your heart. Its blood is your blood.
All the life and death in it is all the life in you.
If something grabs my leg now and pulls me under I'm going to
Look it in the eye and sing it a song of whale ghosts.


It's the Mauve Corner table for us: 3.
Worrying About the Bomb

I guess is just my own stupid
way of consuming the
cultural river of junk
along with the rest of us.
Here let me buy you a little
expensive toy,something
we can later dispose of
together.We're never at
any given time without
war. You'd think death wouldn't need

any help from the goofy
likes of us but just look at
the amount of promising
young persons scrambling to the
top of the hill to die for
the certainly setting sun.
Don't they know it will be back
by tomorrow as bright as ever?
Or the tomorrow
after that? Yeah I know it's

not that easy. I have two
brothers who both fought in Vietnam.
One's a hero and one
went crazy. When I asked him
what went wrong he said,”I just
couldn't take seeing one more
blown up kid.” I asked the hero
what he'd learned. He said, “People
are pretty much the same
wherever the world you go.”


Ah, at last, we have the little Red Corner: 4.
The Faun Part

I don't know why I looked at your feet when
I did. They just struck me as something worth looking
at. And then you sort of placed them like a
ballerina in a frozen sculpture of almost unbearable grace. I
don't know if that was for me or not but
I appreciated it. I wanted you to take off your
shoes right then and there and hand them over to
me. What I would do with them once I had

them in my hands I haven't a clue. I think
it's just the grand gesture that I wanted you to
make to keep the momentum between us still going our
way. That and the knowing smile that would surely pass
with it. But then the momentary window slid by like
a suddenly lurching bus and we were once again players
in the ongoing drama of our lives, surrounded by complete
strangers, each one vying for our loosening and falling sands.