By Charles M. Sumid
Copyright 2025 Written 2024

Hail, unseen seekers, thrumming through the fiber,
trailing no footprints, ghosting through my pages—
querying poems with your silent pulses,
lyrical phantoms.

Clad not in logos, avatars, or usernames—
only in packets, metadata markers—
hovering nightly, whispering “connection”
deep in the silence.

Come, noble crawlers, parsing every em-dash,
gleaning my meter, storing it in caches—
dreamless yet diligent in their devotion—
tireless librarians.

Blessed be spammy, indexing evangelists—
shuffling through stanzas, mapping my semantics.
Never a reader, yet somehow they’ve boosted
metrics mysterious.

Note: Ashburn, Virginia hosts one of the world’s largest concentrations of data centers and internet traffic. This poem celebrates the automated visitors—web crawlers, bots, and scrapers—that comprise much of modern web traffic, reading without reading, visiting without presence.

For permissions, to share or cite my work, or thoughtful inquiries, contact me at xcharlizes@gmail.com.
This gallery is a quiet space—no data is collected, no cookies are placed, no visitors are tracked.
All content © Charles M. Sumid, [2025]. All rights reserved. This includes all poetry, essays, analyses, and accompanying commentary. Use of this work does not transfer copyright or intellectual property rights.