American Diner Archives

I have a new poem for you today, dear reader. It’s original, and I wrote it. The theme of this poem is the classic American diner.

When I shared it with a friend, I was asked how I came up with the idea.

So, I thought I’d share my response with you, too.

It started when I was listening to the song Breakfast in America by the British band Supertramp on the radio.

There are two lines in the song that caught my imagination. They were, “Could we have kippers for breakfast?” and “They gotta’ have ’em in Texas.”

I liked the way the writer had rhymed breakfast with Texas. Yes, it’s not an exact rhyme, but it’s close enough.

So, I decided to try to use those rhyming words in a poem, too.

The next stage in my thought process was to imagine life in an American diner and the banter a young man might have with the waitress.

Then, to make the structure of the poem different, I decided to construct the verses in the style of the form of poetry known as limericks. That is, each verse is a limerick, but they are all connected.

For those who are unfamiliar with this form of poetry, limericks are 5-line poems with a specific rhyme pattern, where lines 1, 2, and 5 rhyme with each other, with typically nine or ten syllables per line. And lines 3 and 4 rhyme with each other, with five to eight syllables per line.

Anyway, once I got the idea, the first version of the poem was simply a flow of consciousness. Then I left it for 24 hours before tidying it up a bit.

I hope you like it.

In case you’re wondering, the “fella from Brussels” I had in mind was the movie star and martial artist, Jean-Claude Van Damme. He is known as the Muscles from Brussels, or so I’m told.