here is what fotography has done:

it has allowed any person with a camera to capture
existential essences once the exclusive domain
of the sculptor and painter

today i saw literally 12 international faces
on the 3rd avenue bus worthy of their own sculptures

i studied their skulls, their cheek bones, their
eye orbitals, their skin - then my mind did
the quick financial calculation for achieving even one
sculpture in bronze (12 would be out of the question)

and then i realized (anew) that the digital photographer,
the newly-self-identified street photographer,
could in short order capture these 12 in their accurate essences

format the images, manipulate the images, &
achieve the aesthetic-poetic
lessongiving of their beautiful, eponymous humanity

and what, after all, is sculpture?
if its 3-dimensional form, then doesn't a mounted
foto, with its x,y & z axes qualify as sculpture
(the z-axis being mere microns)?

can i challenge the definition of
sculpture in a poem, here? am
i negating both sculpture and poetry
in one foul swoop?

are not these symbolic font-gestures
(words) on this page constructed forms,
where the voltage-lengths of the z-axes
qualify this poem as a sculpture?

i wonder how tearing down the walls
of segregation of the arts
would effect the cottage industries
of sycophantic rhetorical criticism?

would i besmirch my name
in the name of clarity?