Aristotle once said that “poetry needs either a sympathetic nature or a madman.”¹ We’ll leave it up to you, our beloved reader, to decide, after you read the following little gem (the line breaks of which we’ve inserted for your convenience), which branch of that dichotomy is most applicable to the case of Steve Seyler, poet laureate of the BID patrol:

Old Joe
Refused to go
And was told he’d be arrested.

He was out to lunch
And threw a punch,
But Kanagi wasn’t listening.²

Not to be dissed,
Kanagi made the pinch
Though Joe was clearly pissed.

Although he began to wail,
He was taken to jail!³

And… it’s illustrated: Don’t YOU feel safer with the BID patrol on the job? Sheesh.

1. Aristotle, Poetics 1455.a33. Bekker number provided so that you can see that yes, Aristotle actually did say what we say he said. It’s not hard to check these things, you know.
2. Sic. Either there’s some error in the text or else one or both of the words “listening” and “arrested” are pronounced very differently inside Steve’s head than we’re used to them being. Maybe they both sound like Bleeearrrrghh!!, which would be consistent with the evidence and would certainly make them rhyme.
3. Poetry and image taken from Steve Seyler’s report to the JSC for November, 2013.

Image of Steve Seyler, man of letters, is ©2014 MichaelKohlhaas.org. Images from Seyler’s report are public records and appear here courtesy of the doctrine of fair use.