asthma study


objectivity destroys subjectivity
as it should in the search for truth
the faceless columns of case and control
can be consummated in a p value
whose tortured significance is lost
on the old philipino woman
struggling to understand the words
of my questions on the telephone
the stillborn interview ending
with a suppressed cough
a nonparticipant who will never
make it into the control group
whether or not she remembered
if the sugar cane was burning
in her environs two weeks ago

paper chase, loss of face
we are treadmilled, trapped
by our way of proving things
as if scientific certainty
were a spider dismembered by ants
after having been crushed
into the bathroom floor
during a biped's nocturnal leak
it can be extrapolated
extracted, even interpolated
that the arachnid felt nothing
either at the moment of death
or upon consumption postmortem...
by other more sanguine accounts
its soul languishes in purgatory

either way, a valid deduction
given the fickle foundation
the frame of reference
of flame of reverence
as the persuasion allows
whores of the method 
our sense of smell
has been anodized by the rose
our touch dulled by sand
our quickness by shackles retarded
we seek the torpid energy of the bomb
whose potential explosion
sucks each data point into void
with the kind of validity
to which we have become accustomed