RIC BASTASA Narrative Poems

somehow the mask has become my own face
you lift it up with your hands and there are no more stories
to be told: about love? there is none anymore, if you insist,
there might be one, but it was about the love that did not die,
...

different?

Though
his earliest poems
...

The soldiers are nearly all young men,
and far more Filipino than is generally supposed -
I should say nine-tenths are native-born.
...