Yeah, let's check the manual first ...

Seen today, (written in this order, line for line) on the side of a Lockheed SR-71 "Blackbird" fighter jet (the whole black machine tucked neatly under a wing of the enormous Spruce Goose) (oops - it's not a fighter jet - it's a spy plane) at the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinville, Oregon:

WARNING
THIS AIRCRAFT CONTAINS A SEAT
CONTAINING AN EXPLOSIVE
CHARGE SEE MAINTENANCE MANUAL
BEFORE REMOVING

First of all, I certainly hope the aircraft contains a seat. But then I read the whole thing, and stopped trying to make sense of the line breaks (it's not poetry - it's the military), and thought to myself, uh ... yeah ... see the maintenance manual so the seat doesn't explode in your face ... seems like a good idea ...

And then I asked the docent about it. I know the docent personally - he is a man who attends the same church we do, and he volunteers his time at the museum, and we'd just found him and he'd been showing us around. So ... what about this, Don? The seat contains an explosive?

"Ejector seat," he said. "Take 'em out the wrong way and it ruins your whole day." (Assuming you didn't intend to blow yourself up, that is.) Then he told us that the ejector seat is rough on the body, but it's there if you need it. He wears the little "silkworm" for the days of silk parachutes and the little wings for having used his ejector seat - over Italy - after WWII. He knows what he's talking about when he says that the day his ejector seat was there when he needed it, "even my hair hurt."

That's not poetry either. Nothing symbolic about that.

But couldn't they have made the line break so that it didn't say, "This aircraft contains a seat" or "charge see maintenance manual"?