Tacoma Center 1600 - Nana Grizol

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