Eat a sandwich, then order stew: it's the sort of thing that happens in a diner that never closes. In eight short lines, Dave Bonta turns that scene into a small argument about hunger, joy and mortality. The title is the only place the setting appears, and it does a lot of work. A 24-hour diner has no closing time, so a meal there never has to be the last one. The poem's final wish grows out of that idea.
The opening couplet puts the body in charge. It is "lips," not a person, that go "after a sandwich beyond all shame." Reducing the eater to a mouth makes the appetite seem to act on its own, and "beyond all shame" gives the scene a faintly comic guilt. Then comes "stop for a stew." The line is brief and could be read two ways: the lips pause to take in more food, or they halt, only to start again. Either way, "stop" is hardly a stop. The sounds back this up. The hissing s of "sandwich," "shame," "stop" and "stew" carries the greed from one line into the next.
The second couplet moves from the counter to the abstract: "some of the best parts of joy / are contrary to faith." The vocabulary changes from sandwiches to ideas, but the sentence stays plain, almost offhand. "Parts" is a quiet pun, since it can mean parts of a feeling, parts of a meal, or parts of a body. "Contrary" suggests that faith and bodily pleasure are not just different but opposed, as if belief asks for restraint and the best joys refuse it. The poem does not say whether this is a confession or a complaint, and that ambiguity keeps it interesting.
Then the register shifts again with "O that infinite mouth." The "O" is the language of prayer or psalm, an exclamation made to something grand. What it addresses is a mouth, and "infinite" lifts the diner customer's appetite into something cosmic. Whose mouth is it? The poem suggests several answers: the speaker's own hunger, human desire in general, or something larger that consumes everything. The follow-up question, "what will be the end of it," plays on "end." It can mean the purpose of all this wanting, or the point where it stops. A hunger that is infinite cannot logically end, yet we know that every eater does.
That tension prepares the last couplet. "I wish for a change / there were no last supper." Read quickly, "for a change" is the everyday idiom meaning "just once." Read slowly, "change" suggests a real transformation, a different story. The Last Supper is the meal that ties eating to sacrifice and death, and it is also the most famous meal of faith. Wishing it away means wishing away the ending that gives the meal its weight. But the wish also fits the diner. If there were no last supper, there would be only the next meal, then another, and the lights would stay on. The speaker's appetite and the poem's religious imagery want the same thing, an end that never comes.
Formally, the poem is four unrhymed couplets with no punctuation. Only "O" and "I" are capitalized, and the rest is lowercase, which keeps the voice hushed and conversational, like a thought muttered over coffee. The lines are short, and the first couplet is the most lopsided: a long, stuffed line of about ten syllables followed by a tiny four-syllable one. After that the lines settle into similar lengths. The balance suits the shift from physical appetite to calmer reflection. Without rhyme, the couplets read as separate remarks that gradually add up to an argument.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so little space. It does not lecture about gluttony or doubt. It lets an ordinary late-night meal raise a large question: if desire is endless and life is not, how should we feel about the joys that outrun our beliefs? The humor of the sandwich-then-stew opening keeps the question from becoming heavy. By the last line the humor has turned into something closer to longing, and the reader is left in an all-night diner, wishing the night would not end.