It's Always Best Just Off the Loading Bench
by Casey Jepson
© 2001


I buy myself a beer, 2 dollars a glass
Throw it through the window of my local QFC
Down a bottle of Sudafed and pass out on the grass
Wake up with a 7-ton gorrilla sleeping next to me

I say to him "Where'd you get that case of Budweiser?
Don't you get light-headed when they ask for ID?"
He says "Just a little trick I learned from Kayce Siezer.
I snatch it from the loading bench while the forman's out tea."

He hands me a bottle and a twisty straw
And some googly-eye glasses and a tongue-shaped spoon
I say "Man, you the best gorilla I ever saw,
this beer's better than a weekend on the moon"

"I gotta try this," I said. "Gotta sneak into the store."
And so I started digging a subterranean trench
For beer and pretzels, this hole I bore
'Cause It's always best just off the loading bench.

That night I guzzled a gallon of Sprite,
13 pizzas and fried chicken skin.
I couldn't bare to eat another bite,
even a mint that was only wafer thin.

The boxboys never caught me, never found my tunnel
I blocked with a sheet of tin, screws & a wrench
The food I enjoy so much, I must eat with a funnel
'Cause it's always best just off the loading bench.

I asked my friend Reiko to make up the title of a poem. She sent me this title, and I wrote it right away. I wonder how close this is to what she ment.
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