C is for Curses!

Leanne O'Rourke has put out a call for abecedarian verse on Facebook. It's a fun challenge, but I have to warn you: before you begin, type out every first letter, line by line... or else you might scccccccccrew things up, as I did:

As the decades flow, with each new year,
Being loses ground to childhood fear.
Calmly take the pulse of nervous blood;
Count each barricade against the flood;
Deem the shore a death-zone to be crossed,
Every naked pebble, something lost:
Final in its failure to support,
Ghostlike, any scaffold of the sort
Hung against the day when tides will burst
Inwards, foaming heralds of the worst.

Just when you begin to see the fire
Kindled for safe passage from the dire
Lashing of the leopard-surfaced waves,
Morning, with its maze-like architraves
Nullifies, with fog or spattered hail,
Open routes that might have been a trail,
Passages that might have led to land
Quickly. Now the desolated strand
Runs in streaming shadows far away.
Solar hints of any saving day
Topple into darkness.

Under skies
Very much like oceanic trenches,
Weather brings a set of claws that clenches
Xylophagously against the barque
You had set asail, back in the year
Zero, in your flight from childhood fear.

My second attempt went wrong in a different way!

Ask yourself: do any of your fears
Balk at their exposure? As it nears,
Consciousness might quiver at the sight,
Delay a confrontation, or take flight
Endlessly, to shun that fearful touch.

Forces of our heritage conspire
(Genes and culture, childhood, and the dire
Honesty that tears the self apart
Intimately, with a lover's art),
Justify a cowardly retreat,
Kill off any effort to unseat
Living fears that claim a living toll.
Many of our dreads are in control
Negatively, and by secret means
Obstruct our sight with parasitic screens.

Politicians know this. All their lies
Quicken fears against the stranger's rise,
Reap the crops of prejudice that grow
Suddenly, when economic woe
Turns against the public good. Beware!
Under fear, our liberties are lost;
Verities of ancient days are tossed
Witlessly aside. We lose our past.
Xenophobic policies are cast.
Yellow seeps into our varied flags
Zealously, and tears them into rags.

Today is just not my day for abecedarian rhyming couplets in acephalous iambic pentameter. Blarb.