Tacoma Center 1600

(album: Ursa Minor - 2017)

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 stretch when they lock you up

But either way, they are commodifying someone
As if said someone ever could just fade away:
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 it's 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, on unnamed roads

It is a euphemistic package for apartheid
A billion dollars earned in someone else's blood
A manufactured answer to a xenophobic question
How to monetize the labors lost from deportation trolls

Hundred and twenty five dollars a bed
Hundred and twenty five dollars a head
And on weekends we gathered outside of the gates
Just to read off the names of the dead

I must say it's a strange sense of sedition
Just to show the hopes you hold
Contracts the contradict's contrition
Of soulless states, of stateless souls

Oh eugenic organs, how you beat, constrict and breathe
Oh you magic markets do detain, defeat, deceive
And on the edge of this gross city, your mixed metaphors conceive
Remuneration, replication, yeah, interminably
Oh eugenic organs, how you beat, constrict and breathe
Oh you magic markets do detain, defeat, deceive
And on the edge of this gross city, your mixed metaphors conceive
Remuneration, replication, yeah, interminably