On this page are four double acrostics:

Circle

Concentric
Illuminati
Rotator
Revolver
Cryogenic
Lyrical
Eye

Square

Solly takes
Quirky tranq
Usually you
Affect aphasia
Rigid rigueur
Eventual cure

Oval

O-ring O Levy-O
Victory V
Aspartame/Stevia
Losing a peel

Bear

Ball o’ fur–a lustrous cub
Rally hope: some honey’d grub’ll
Osculate a bearcub’s mecca
With approv’d Interior Sec
No City Hall ought order Peck

Notes

For the Circle acrostic I was looking for self-containment, so I picked individual words: they’d be ending the way they began, which always seemed neat to me.

Having some success with Circle, I decided to double down with Square; I used two-word lines. This yielded limited opportunity for rhyme, but I managed to wrestle a semblence of a final couplet out of it.

With Oval, I looked at the two O-bookended first line and for some reason remembered a game I’d never played, but only read about. The game is Ringolevio, which originated in New York City and, as far as I can tell, is strictly a “back East” game. In Arizona, where I grew up, we had games like Tag and Freeze Tag and Capture the Flag and Red Rover and Tackletown (also known as Pom Pom Pullaway) which incorporate some of the Ringolevio concepts–but I digress. The line would be served best, I thought, if it gene-spliced an O-Ring into Ringolevio. And what fun to have Levy take part…the rest of Oval was similarly whimsical.

And whimsicality was a good lead-in to Bear, which is the only member of the quartet to not be a geometric shape. To show how the rigidity had left the rails I made the double acrostic two types of bear rather than “Bear/Bear.” But it’s not all whimsy: the United States of America once had a sellout for a Secretary of the Interior. His name was James Watt, and his game was pandering to Big Oil and other land-exploitative corpsters. So the last two lines are a twisty call for a proper pecking order that puts Nature first.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow will be my 100th blog post in 100 days. Special edition!