somethingdarker | Feb. 8th, 2010

Feb. 8th, 2010

( Busy )

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( Bush )

Burning bush of a lost dream - Daisy Aldan "Under the Marble Arches"

My face a burning bush or wheel - Virginia Konchan "Black Hole"

Like God out of his Burning Bush - Lola Ridge "Jude"

Where thornbushes sprout - Enheduana "The Temple Hymns: 1. E-Abzu, the Temple of Ea in Eridu" transl. by Sophus Helle

In every thorn-bush are thousands slain - Rumi "The Call of the Beloved" transl. by R.A. Nicholson

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( Bugle )

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( Buoy )

( Buoyant )

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( Bullet )

This bullet-borne language - Brian Turner "Phantom Noise"

A bullet hole in the pay phone - Mahogany L. Browne "On St. John's and Franklin Avenue"

Bullet holes in the soles of his feet - Martin Espada "How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way"

Each bullet hole suffused with moon - Keetje Kuipers "Across a Great Wilderness without You"

Can't take a photo through the bulletproof glass - Alexandra Lytton Regalado "La Cachiporrista"

With ankles of oak and a bullet-proof perm - Vincent Toro "¿Que Que La Femme?"

The bullet-riddled aftermath - Millie Ho "Beasts of New France"

A bullet-stream of oyster shells - Dana Levin "The Living Teaching"

A silver bullet against every demon you fashioned - Ali Trotta "The Devil You Know"

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( Butter )

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( Buttercup )

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( Burnish )

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Buckling to blossoms now - Oliver Baez Bendorf "Dysphoria"

Loosen the buckles of my mind - Tamiko Beyer "February"

For I pass their buckles by - "The Country of Mayo, or the 'Lament of Thomas Flavell, or Lavell'" c.1660 transl. by George Fox

To buckle the winged sandals on - James Russell Lowell "Agassiz"

Softly buckled round their toes - Furnley Maurice "Barter"

Buckle on the incline - Kay Ryan "Grazing Horses"

Buckle on my spirit's skate - "Thy Heart"

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( Bucket )

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( Bundle )

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Crashing its micro-mastodon bulk through a carpet forest - G. O. Clark "Sound Check"

Caught the bulk of the vampire - Dorsey Craft "The Pirate Anne Bonny Says She's Not the Madwoman in the Attic"

Laughing at the bulk of the need - Carly Inghram "For a Moment, Everything Is Small and Familiar"

Among the bulks of actual things - Padraic H. Pearse "The Fool"

Sober bulk and adamantine hold - Duncan Campbell Scott "Home Song"

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Defying windy bureaucracies with their cadences - Mouna Ammar "Our Names"

What sad bureaucracy of luck - Leonard Cohen "O Wife Unmasked"

Bureaucracy and blood-borne grudge - Linda Gregerson "Cranes on the Seashore"

A tracery of dreams invented by bureaucracies - Jacie Ragan "The Secret Lives of Fingerprints"

A bureaucracy of boundless becoming - Dana Wall "Customer Service Representative's Nots on Soul Processing" [Strange Horizons 2 June 2025]

By December's infallible bureaucracy - Matthew Zapruder "The Book of Oxygen"

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( Burrow )

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Whole Hecatombs receive the Butcher's steel - William Combe "The First of April"

Butchered by curst Achilles' ruthless son - Euripedes "Hecuba" transl. by Michael Wodhull

What priest, what butcher is at hand to slay these - Euripedes "Hercules Distracted" transl. by Michael Wodhull

The whole dark butchery without a soul - Richard Le Gallienne "The Illusion of War"

Who butcher Peace and barter Truth - Joaquin Miller "To Ye Fighting Lords of London Town"

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( Bull )

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Buffeted by the waves of chance - Cora C. Bass "The Waves of Chance"

Whirlwinds buffet the horses - Li Ho "Song of the Sacred Strings" transl. by Burton Watson

That buffets back slow time - Alan Porter "Introduction to a Narrative Poem"

Whom the winds had buffeted - E.J. Pratt "Re-Born"

Buffeted with bouquets and blinded with confetti - Iris Tree "[Ah! you, from the small high-walled acre]"

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Fenced by bulwarks of the law - Sir William Blackstone "The Lawyer's Farewell to His Muse"

The turrets and the bulwarks of their dreams - Maxwell E. Foster "Five Sonnets 4"

Thy bulwarks diamonds square - Anonymous "The Heavenly Jerusalem"

Upon the bulwark of its silence - Ishion Hutchinson "Rocksteady"

Bulwarked with a thread of foam - Trumbull Stickney "At Sainte-Marguerite"

No bulwark strong enough - Veronica Zondek "cold fire 4" transl. by Katherine Silver

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( Business )

Towering bellows of babbling businessmen - Nancy Mercado "I Have Seen"

Watched God wandering the station in a business suit - T.R. Hummer "After"

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Burial.

( Bury )

Some elusive bog-buried Lucy - Mary Jo Bang "I Could Have Been Better"

Ruined temples half-buried in sand - Henry van Dyke "The River of Dreams"

Long-buried springs in my heart awaken - Robin Flower "The Pipes"

Unbury.

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( Burn )

Through the afterburn on my retinas - Lisa M. Bradley "Una Cancion de Keys"

A burning bush driven by a godawful wind - Yusef Komunyakaa "You and I Are Disappearing"

My face a burning bush or wheel - Virginia Konchan "Black Hole"

Burn Out/Burnt Out.

Diamond-glittering mine of ever-burning stars - J.S.D.S. "The Poet" (The Knickerbocker v.10:1, July 1837)

That cheerful string of heartburn - Aimee Le "Poem Written by Aimee's Imaginary Roommate, Charles"

A hollowed-out candle left burning - Julia Bouwsma "Feeble-Minded"

Lit with one slow-burning flame - Francis Brett Young "Thamar (To Thamar Karsavina)"

the mutterings of sunburned hearts - May Chong "Bunian Laundry"

Above your splendid sunburnt throat - Emily Pauline Johnson "The Idlers"

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( Bubbles )

Vaguely outlined and bubble-frail - Dorothea Mackellar "An Afterglow on the Nile"

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( Build/Built )

( Builded )

( Builder )

( Building )

A half-built garden of theft - Erika Meitner "Ghost Eden"

Avenues porous with ill-built adornments - Adrian Matejka "16 Bars Poetica"

Low-built nests where robins sing - Annie Fellows Johnston "At Early Candle-Lighting"

Rimmed round by steel-built battleships - Joaquin Miller "To the Boers"

Rebuild.

Unbuilt all walls of thought - Laurence Binyon "The Road Menders"

Tell me of your wrath-built Babel - William Lumley "Shadows" [Fantasy Fan v.1 no.9, May 1934]

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( Burden )

Columbus's doom-burdened caravels - J.C. Squire "Sonnet [There was an Indian]"

Words to unburden them of their meanings - Brandy Nālani McDougall "Ka ‘Ōlelo"

Unburdened by desire - Sara Teasdale "Vignettes Overseas"

Unburdened by any supplication - Charles Wright "Little Ending"

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( Burst )

We've chased cloudbursts ever since - Tanaya Winder "For Girls Who Run Through Storms like Buffalos, Knowing It's the Quickest Way Through"

A dynamo of swirled memory, of fire-bursts - Ian Goh "Firework"

With outbursts of unreasoning rage - H.P. McKnight "Prelude"

Rhapsodic outbursts of brilliance coloring every damned spot - L. Lamar Wilson "Lauren Oya Olamina Explains Earthseed to Ernest Hemingway"

A minor star-burst of cranes - Sheila Black "Radium Dream"

A starburst compass pointing in all the directions - Ted Kooser "A Map of the World"

Five teeth tell the sunburst story - Adrian Castro "A Cuban Modernist in Miami"

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With its blight of glass bulbs - Mary Jo Bang "A Sonata for Four Hands"

The speed with which the bulbs blast - John James "time bending / tongue / entwine / the betwixt"

Where bulbs break into bloom - Jennifer Key "Rich People in Paintings,"

And one by one the bulbs went dark - Keith Leonard "Museum"

streetlights shatter, each bulb a gasping eye - CP Nwankwo "Error 404: Expiation Not Found" [20 Oct. 2025]

The flashbulb blind who wait for color to return - Wyatt Prunty "Mole"

Lightbulb.

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Disintegrated into a sky burial of trade - Semaj Brown "Almost Majnun"

Beneath this burial of light - Chris Dombrowski "October Suite"

Each word dressed for burial - Rigoberto Gonzalez "In the Village of Missing Fathers"

Against the great sun's burial - T.M. Kettle "On Leaving Ireland (July 14, 1916)"

A black-draped sun in cosmic burial ground - Harry Martinson "Aniara 77" transl. by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg

Stand an endless night in cosmic burial grounds - Harry Martinson "Aniara 77" transl. by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg

The names those noteless burial-stones display - Owen Roe mac an Bhaird (or Ward), c.1608 "A Lament for the Princes of Tyrone and Tyrconnel" transl. by James Clarence Mangan

Bury.

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Turning up nothing but bushels of earth - Hilaire Belloc "A Moral Alphabet: K"

Congregate pears in moonlit bushels - Hart Crane "Passage"

Once reigned supreme among bushels and pits - Deborah Garrison "Her Majesty Loses Her Touch"

Slept among the bushels of threshed wheat - Victor Hugo "Boaz Asleep" transl. not credited

Eating your bushel of dirt - "Huzza for the Rule of the Whigs!" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXCIII, July 1848, v.LXIV]

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The dull engagements of the bustling world - Mark Akenside "The Pleasures of Imagination Book. A Poem, in Three Books. III"

Who make so much bustle and noise in vain - "The Frost" [Happy Days for Boys and Girls, 1877]

Brought coin and bustle - "The Golfiad"

Bustling on her thousand ways - Lola Ridge "Firehead part VI: The Merchant of Babylon 1: Before Dawn"

The bustling practice of the world - Edmund Clarence Stedman "Refuge in Nature"

The bustling world's ways grown distant - T'ao Chien "After Mulberry-Bramble Liu's Poem" transl. by David Hinton

The four seasons keep bustling each other away - T'ao Chien "[Days and months never take their time]" transl. by David Hinton

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( Bud )

From the leaves of budless violets - Lascelles Abercrombie "Ryton Firs: The Voices in the Dream"

Brandishing flowerbuds of desire - Surdas "Sur's Ocean 64: The Pangs and Politics of Love" transl. by John Stratton Hawley

Rigid myrrh-bud, camphor-flower - H.D. "Sea Iris"

Rosebud.

And all the myriad star-buds burst in flame - Lloyd Roberts "Flowers of the Sky"

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( Butterfly )

Butterfly-winged sphinxes guarded their eggs - Mike Allen "Carrington's Ferry"

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To disarm the most resilient bully - Ching-In Chen "A Natural History of My White Girl"

The bully of the bootleg town - Joseph Seamon Cotter Sr. "The Tragedy of Pete"

Only the bullying sun of Madrid - Seamus Heaney "Singing School: 4. Summer 1969"

To bully me into these festive occasions - Stanley Kunitz "Passing Through"

A bully pushing lettuce around - Brenda Shaughnessy "Never Ever"

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( Buy )

( Bought )

Trembling for a blood-bought crown - Francis Blake Crofton "The Battle-Call of Anti-Christ"

Far-fetched and dear-bought - Algernon Swinburne "A Singing Lesson"

Not tears by a hard-bought mirth - Faith Baldwin "The Last Demand"

Earnest welcome, unbought, unfeigned, and true - Effie Afton "Lines to a Friend, on Removing from Her Native Village"

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( Burn Out )

Burn.

Out.

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On a bus looking for your grave - Tyree Daye "Uncle Gig's Return"

A bus breathing heavily at the station - Laura Kasischke "Champagne"

Tried to ride the buses without paying - David C. Kopaska-Merkel "Eel Week"

Another bus for the battlefield - Alicia Suskin Ostriker "The Battlefield: A Lyric"

Waiting for a bus that would never come - Nancy Ellis Taylor "Voodoo Corner Bus Stop"

Steering a crosstown bus is not for the faint - Vincent Toro "¿Que Que La Femme?"

Bussing with the gossip of dreams - Iris Tree "[I have no other friend but thee]"

Nine hundred omnibuses rumble up and down - Felix Leigh "London Town"

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( Button )

( Buzz )

And all that bee-buzzed jazz - Barbara Crooker "This Summer Day"

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The buzzards hadn't even been unwrapped - Jaswinder Bolina "Sunday, Sunday"

There are always buzzards in the sky - Salomon de la Selva "Tropical Town"

Where the brown buzzard flies - Emma Lazarus "The South"

A buzzard outside my window - Ada Limon "Paseo del Bosque"

Buzzards covered with ashes - Pablo Neruda "Ode to Federico Garcia Lorca" translated by Donald D. Walsh

long before the buzzard comes - Brandon O'Brian "Population Changes"

The hard crooked flying of buzzards - Lynn Riggs "The Arid Land"

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Bumping only against the sky - Holly Karapetkova "The Woman Who Wanted a Child"

All bumps and potholes that could take out your wheel - Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha "bad road"

And emptied the whole bumper at one draught - Euripides "The Cyclops" transl. by Michael Wodhull

Each with a goblet bumper'd up to brim - Edward Edwin Foot "The Death, Burial, and Destruction of Bacchus"

My goosebumps heavy as a sandbag - Mouna Ammar "Finding Me"

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