I arrived in a small town in southern New Mexico around noon one Sunday. The restaurant at the motel where I was staying wasn’t open on Sunday, and neither were any other restaurants in the vicinity. I was hungry, so I asked several people if there was a place within walking distance where I could get a good meal. They all recommended the same place, a diner about a mile or so away. A half hour later I was sitting in a booth in that diner, poring over the menu. The place was full, so it took a while for a waitress to take my order and even longer before I was served. I ordered some juice, a steak, mashed potatoes with gravy, mixed vegetables, a cup of coffee, and a slice of apple pie. As I said, I was hungry. While I waited, I looked around and saw that everyone else in the diner seemed to be enjoying his or her lunch.
By the time my meal finally arrived, I was positively famished and looked forward to eating every single bite that was put in front of me. The first thing about my lunch that I noticed was that the juice was warm. Also, it had an odd, unpleasant taste, and I decided not to drink it. I tasted the mashed potatoes. They were lumpy, and the gravy tasted even more unpleasant than the juice. The vegetables were such an unattractive mess and looked so unappetizing that I couldn’t bring myself to sample them. After some effort, I managed to cut a piece off the overdone steak but noted with dismay that it was practically inedible. It had the consistency of cardboard and an unsavory flavor; also it hurt my teeth and jaw when I tried to chew it. There was bread on a side plate, but that was stale and had bits of mold on it.
I decided to skip the main course and try the dessert—but no luck there. The pie managed to be tasteless, tough, and mushy all at the same time, and the coffee was cold and weird. Even though I went into that diner hungry, I went out hungry. I simply couldn’t bear to eat that meal. However, as I mentioned, I observed that everyone else there was eating his or her meal with relish. I guess that they’d simply gotten used to it.
Lunch was not a total loss, however, because I took out my notebook and made extensive notes about it and then wrote a poem based on it. Here it is: 
Gussie’s Greasy Spoon
Every day, at ten past noon,
I enter GUSSIE’S GREASY SPOON,
I plop down in the nearest seat,
and order food unfit to eat.
I try the juice, it’s warm and vile,
the scrambled eggs are green as bile,
the beets are blue, the beans are gray,
the cauliflower tastes like clay.
At GUSSIE’S GREASY SPOON, the stew
is part cement, part hay, part glue,
it’s mostly gristle, ropy tough,
a tiger couldn’t chew the stuff.
The rancid soup is foul and thin,
a bit like bitter medicine,
the melon smells, the salad sags,
the mashed potatoes seem like rags.
One whiff of Gussie’s weird cuisine
makes stomachs ache, turns faces green,
her moldy muffins have no peers,
they’ll make you sick for forty years.
The coffee’s cold, the cake is stale,
the doughnuts taste like pickled whale,
yet, every day, at ten past noon,
I eat at GUSSIE’S GREASY SPOON.