The empathy reaver

Another's vomiting 
is not like my own
vomiting. 

Dim. Sympathetic. 
Tugs heartstrings 
from deep sick 
visceral just to see 
or even hear their
misery, knowing 

I've felt such wracked 
pangs and worse! Such
upheaval and gushing revolt
from deep out of me, revealing 
me,
inner,
disgusting -

where I am
in my inmost 
utmost core.

Made of meat still twitching
on wires, swollen by pumping
ichor and other humors, vile
and foul, the stink

kept in by a sensitive, lightly-furred
sausage casing. Kept 

mostly in. 

But when we puke, we know.

Mine though is far worse. Theirs
only recalls mine. It brings
a horror movie playing in back 
of mind: a patchwork piecemeal 
docudrama montage of nausea
experienced directly, for real.

Direct: imminent and immanent,
immediate, insidious sheer reality of it
explicit in white hot

shocked shards
of gaping wholes,
cramping parts and
gasping flesh, a moment

like many, forever seared
and etched in nerve and muscle
memory, yet - potent and gross as it is!

- only a dim sympathetic recall 

compared to the real thing, which 

I know is much worse. 

I have been there. Been that 
wretch. That thing, powerless,
helpless before, after and during 

my own body.

Another 
is only going
through a semblance 
of what I have had. 

For real.