Bittersweet Journeys is a poetic anthology of my heart-felt experiences ranging in time from adolescence to the present. An experiment in "painting with words," it was written for the sheer delight of unfettered expression. Much of the short verse was written in college, and a few poems were written in high school during periods of deep emotional turmoil. The more recent poems range in mood from the droll to the whimsical to the emotionally turbulent. My best poem, "The Sound of Madness," written in a state of despair induced by persistent and disturbing voice-hearing, won second prize in a national poetry competition in 2010; subsequently, "The Blown-Out Candle" won third prize that year in the same competition. Generally, my poems attempt to convey the multi-faceted nature of psychological experience, often through a spiritual lens.