Nick Pentzell

WAVES*

Listen to Audio Version read by Sean Mahoney.

Tongue in knots, tied by a sailor of troubled seas,
My words remain shipwrecked in soundless isolation.
Thoughts wash up and I sift through brackish ideas
In search of a conch.

Found, in my hand it makes music,
Blown long and hard.
Across oceans it sounds:
A siren’s song,
The aching cry of a gull,
Windswept, windward,
Misapprehended far from its source.

On the beach I loose
Calypso peals from the shell,
Splashing through the soul like a breaker
Pounding pores in salt spray,
A sound that penetrates and heals
Before it ebbs away to silence.

* Originally published in Pegasus.

 

Nick Pentzell is completing his associate’s degree at Delaware County Community College in Media, Pennsylvania. A presenter at disability conferences and workshops, he has written about autism in The Philosophy of Autism (2013), Real People, Regular Lives (2011), Sharing Our Wisdom (2003), and in journals, including Disability Studies Quarterly, AutCom’s The Communicator, and The Other Side. His award-winning video, Outside/Inside (2002), has been shown at disability film festivals worldwide.