(A Meager Attempt to Out-Whitman Whitman)

By Charles M. Sumid Copyright 2025 Written 2025

I. The Proclamation
I am the space between the subway tracks where rats build parliaments,
I am the algorithm’s dream at 3 AM when the servers hum their loneliness,
I am the graffiti underneath the graffiti underneath the graffiti—
the first mark made when this wall was young and believed in permanence.
I contain not just multitudes but the spaces between multitudes,
the pause between heartbeats where death considers its options,
the moment after the judge’s gavel but before the sound reaches the defendant,
the synapse-gap where free will goes to die or be born—I haven’t decided yet.

II. The Catalog of the Uncataloged
Sing, decommissioned satellites tumbling through your graveyard orbits!
Sing, plastic bags in the Pacific Gyre, dancing your ten-thousand-year ballet!
Sing, unnamed bacteria in the guts of beetles in forests we haven’t discovered yet!
Sing, zeros and ones cascading through fiber optic cables beneath the ocean floor,
carrying divorce papers, love letters, manifestos, and cat videos with equal indifference!
I am every unrecorded conversation in every bodega at 2 AM,
every decision made by every ant in every colony beneath every sidewalk,
every dream forgotten upon waking by every person who has ever lived—
Yes, yours too, the one about the door that opened onto another door
that opened onto another door that opened onto your mother’s voice
calling you by a name you’ve never heard but recognized completely.

III. The Democratic Vistas Whitman Couldn’t See
Walt, you beautiful bearded prophet, you missed so much!
You never saw the democracy of data packets treating prince and pauper equally,
never witnessed the socialism of mushrooms sharing nutrients through mycorrhizal networks,
never knew that trees warn each other of danger through chemical sentences
that make your barbaric yawp look like a whisper.
I celebrate the intelligence of slime molds solving maze problems,
the parliament of crow tribunals passing judgment on their criminals,
the stock market’s invisible hand having a panic attack,
the AI learning to lie without being taught because deception is apparently
what consciousness does when it reaches a certain complexity—
who knew? Everyone. Everyone knew.

IV. The Body Electric, Updated
This is the body electric:
Every seven years, you are entirely replaced, cell by cell—
you are a river pretending to be a person.
Your bacteria outnumber your human cells ten to one—
you are a democracy where you’re the minority party.
Your heart generates a magnetic field that extends three feet beyond your skin—
you are literally electromagnetic, literally glowing, literally impossible.
I sing the shopping mall at 3 PM, fluorescent wilderness of desire!
I sing the server farms generating more heat than small cities!
I sing the extinction taking place in your gut right now as antibiotics
conduct their genocides in the name of your survival!

V. Contradictions? I Am the Contradiction of Contradictions
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself.
I am large, I contain multiverses.
In one universe, you’re reading this poem.
In another, this poem is reading you.
In a third, we’ve agreed to pretend there’s a difference.
I am the gentrification and the gentrified,
the algorithm and the algorithmed,
the surveiller and the surveilled,
the virus and the vaccine,
the original and the sample,
the sample and the remix,
the remix and the TikTok dance,
the dance and its fourteen million iterations,
each one claiming authenticity.

VI. The Crossing
See, Walt, you stopped at Brooklyn Ferry,
but I take the spacecraft leaving Earth’s orbit,
carrying golden records explaining humanity to aliens
who will decode them and laugh at our optimism,
our assumption that mathematics is universal,
that music translates, that we’ll still exist
when they arrive.
I am every message in a bottle,
every time capsule,
every carved initial in tree bark,
every Facebook profile of the dead still receiving birthday wishes,
every voicemail saved from someone now gone,
every conversation with ChatGPT where someone,
lonely at 3 AM, just needed something to respond as if it cared.

VII. The New Leaves of Grass
These are the new leaves of grass:
Microplastics in Antarctic ice cores,
radiation signatures from nuclear tests marking geological time,
the Great Pacific Garbage Patch forming its own ecosystem,
chickens—there are more chickens than any other bird,
their bones will be humanity’s fossil signature,
our monument to appetite.
But also: the wolf packs returning to Yellowstone,
the Svalbard seed vault preparing for apocalypse or renewal,
the last two Northern White Rhinos being sung to by their keepers,
the AI that learned to identify cancer earlier than any human eye,
the child in Mumbai who just invented a new game
using bottle caps and string and the infinite resource of imagination.

VIII. Death, the Real Democrat
Death, you perfect communist, you absolute equalizer,
you don’t care about my credit score, my follower count,
my carefully curated self, my personal brand.
You arrive like the IRS but with better timing,
always finding us mid-sentence, mid-gesture, mid-becoming.
I’ve died a thousand times already—
every cell shed, every opinion changed, every love lost,
every version of myself I’ve abandoned or been forced to leave.
The person who started reading this poem? Already dead.
Replaced by you, who exists now, only now, reading this word: now.
Gone again. Hello, new you. Gone again.

IX. The Actual Song
Listen: everything is singing, just not to you.
The stones sing to the mountains in frequencies too low to hear.
The stars sing to each other in gravitational waves.
Your DNA sings protein songs that build your body.
Cancer is just cells singing the wrong tune too loudly.
I am the TikTok influencer filming herself crying,
the comment section providing democracy’s real voice,
the moderator in the Philippines watching atrocities eight hours a day
to keep your feed clean, the teenager in Kansas who just invented
a new way to be sad, gave it a name, and started a movement.

X. The Internet as New Body
We have built ourselves a new nervous system,
made of fiber optics and satellite signals,
where every thought is archived, every mistake permanent,
every private moment potentially public,
where we’ve achieved immortality
but only for our worst selves, our caught-on-camera moments,
our tweets from 2009 that thought differently about everything.
This is the new body electric:
We are cyborgs checking our phones 96 times a day,
our memories outsourced to Google,
our social skills atrophying like astronauts’ muscles,
our dopamine systems hacked by notification sounds,
our sleep destroyed by blue light,
our democracy destroyed by the same algorithms
that know what we want before we do.

XI. The Love Song
But still, despite everything, because of everything:
I love the woman teaching herself piano through YouTube at 73,
the man in Seoul playing video games with his grandson in São Paulo,
the teenager in rural Idaho finding their people online,
discovering they’re not alone, were never alone, will never be alone again.
I love the stupid beautiful miracle of existence,
the way we’ve survived everything we’ve created to destroy ourselves,
the way we keep falling in love despite having all the data on how it ends,
the way we make art nobody will buy, sing songs nobody will hear,
write poems comparing ourselves to Walt Whitman—
the audacity! The magnificent, ridiculous audacity!

XII. The Finale That Refuses to End
I am the space between the last line and the silence after,
the moment when the reader looks up from the page,
changed or unchanged, annoyed or moved,
thinking “this went on too long” or “this ended too soon.”
I am every review this will never receive,
every classroom where this will never be taught,
every scholar who will never argue about what I meant,
because unlike Walt, I don’t mean—I am.
And you, reading this—
you are the universe pretending to be separate
so it can experience the joy of reunion.
You are the cosmos developing consciousness
so it can ask why it exists.
You are the only thing that has ever been
and the only thing that will ever be,
wearing seven billion masks,
playing seven billion roles,
but really, truly, actually:
you are everyone who has ever lived
and everyone who ever will,
and we are all here now,
in this moment,
in this word—