Getting older one stands the chance of converting bitter into sweet. There is also the chance that what was sweet that turned bitter may transform into bittersweet.

::::::::

That's a lie

The first sip isn't sweet

But with the first sip

Everything else just

Smacks of sweet

I'm just saying

My first sip says

Life is sweet

The second sip says

That was then

Third sip

Toughen up mister

The last sip is

Strong bitter cool

And I get to thinking

I remember reading

Iron and Silk by Salzman

About the author's time in China

Teaching English

And learning Kung Fu

Under Pan Qingfu

He was instructed

To learn to taste bitter

For some reason

I conflate Salzman's story

With the plot of

Good Morning Vietnam

Robin Williams plays

The unruly Adrian Cronauer

I think both protagonists

Left behind an Asian lover

Don't correct me if I'm wrong

It is because I am 69

That everything is

Pouring into one stream

And that has even happened

With sweet and bitter

Sometimes bitter

Tastes sweet

And sweet bitter

But mostly it's just

Bittersweet

This whole thing

Is a love story when

We leave I mean we

Leave that taste behind

(Article changed on August 1, 2020 at 13:31)

Authors Website: https://garylindorff.wordpress.com

Authors Bio:

Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.


He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.