Chris Santiago - The Silverest Tongue in the Phillipines lyrics

I can hear my uncle muttering in the stillness of his cell. Badmouthing Aguinaldo. Reciting Marx & Mao. He has the sharpest tongue in the Philippines. It's why His Excellency the President hates him & why his doomed brother worships him. I can hear him all the way from Bloomington wheedling inside cowry shells ice buildup in our gutters. I won't be born for years but my ears are preternaturally sharp. The brother drops out of school & joins the partisans in Antique. Picks up where he left off—agrarian politics & explosives. Or maybe it's his cellmate who has the deadliest tongue in the Philippines. But my uncle is alone— it's the silence I call his cellmate because he has to give it space, be wary of its moods. It's big & oppressive; solitary. He balls up inside minutes, fissures, the spoon-dug tunnel of his throat. Even the shrikes who're supposed to angle in & give succor shy away. He meets me at the terminal in aviators & a black BMW. Even I can tell, though I hardly speak the language—he has the silverest tongue in the Philippines. Bus boys, shop girls, investors, bureaucrats, even the cop he u-turns illegally in front of— they blush, chuckle, kowtow, make promises to look out, for example, for his nephew who has the most leaden tongue in the Philippines. We meet his friends in the lounge of the Shangri-La: oysters, live music. He doesn't drink but talks & grows younger as he does so. He's younger even than I am: he's got the most gifted tongue in the Philippines. He wins an award & the Palace invites him to fly out & speak. But he gets up, lashes out at the President seated behind him: speaks storm surge, speaks outrage, speaks velocity & eruption. Now his words are getting muffled: the blizzards that give birth to me are whiting out his cell. He's spellbound. Horrified. Something's finally gotten his tongue. He can hear three hundred miles away: the jeep muttering up to the checkpoint, soldiers placing the faces, his brother making a break for it but dropping what he's tucked in his shirt; the explosion doesn't k** him but is followed by a sudden report— a firearm making more silence in a dazed & speechless country.