Tacoma Center sixteen hundred suffer sleepless nights
no phone calls home to families, no reading, no Miranda rights
a second tier of prison, as if the first was not enough
it seems a citizen?s great promise is
a place to sleep when they lock you up
But either way, they are commodifying someone,
the dreary endless days don?t pass like numbers on a page,
they sit in silence ?til they rail against the irons of their cage
But such a casual addition to supplies, to chains, to flows
tucked between logistics systems, a lock factory, a railroad
as billboards picture families, reunited in their homes
buses carry ?unnamed? inmates
to unnamed jails, to unnamed roads
It is a euphemistic package for apartheid
a billion dollars earned in someone else?s blood
how to monetize the labors lost from deportation trolls
Hundred and twenty five dollars a head
hundred and twenty five dollars a bed
and on weekends we gathered outside of the gates
just to read off the name of the dead
I must say it?s a strange sense of sedition
just to show the hopes we?d hold
contract the contradict contrition
of soulless states, of stateless souls
(No chords)
Oh eugenic organs, how you beat, constrict, and breathe
And oh you magic markets do detain, defeat, deceive
and on the edge of this gross city, your mixed metaphors conceive
remuneration, replication, yes, interminably.