Baby, It's Cold Down Here

[71degrees]

Your first six lines captured me with interest, heavy material exposed without flowering.  The seventh and eighth lines are my favourite.  

as an asthmatic waits for breath,
as a diabetic waits for insulin,

This to me is hearing my own pulse beating within.  These lines make me feel my breath, they bring me into a surreal moment and this for me is what poetry is all about.

as a paraplegic waits for legs

Not sure how correct you desire your poetry to be but a paraplegic has legs, just no sense of or ability to move them.  

The last word of the twelfth line, statistic is repetitive and distracting, it jars me back into the common reality of just reading words and just like that my love affair with this piece slowly starts to disintegrate.  This feeling only furthers as I read the remainder of the poem.  A recital of overly used images.  The entire second leg of this poem is stale, unwanted and unneeded.  I am left wanting, not because of grand mystery or illusion but because this felt like it was going somewhere, maybe off a cliff into the great unknown but really it only dug itself into the ground and is now hiding from its own potential epiphany.

Love the observation about the legs. Very astute. "Statistic" has been mentioned more than once. Like your approach to the second half of the poem. Thanks. More than once.