Tacoma Center 1600

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