The Senate Will Decide (Emperor Palpatine)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You were a senator first —
which is the part
nobody remembers
because senators
are not supposed to be
the most dangerous person
in the building
You filed motions
and attended committees
and voted on trade disputes
with the patience
of a man
who knows
that bureaucracy
is the longest weapon in the room
and the longest weapon
is the one
nobody identifies as a weapon
until the room
is already his

[Verse 2]
Order Sixty-Six —
you hid it
inside the system
the way a surgeon
hides a stitch
inside the fold:
invisible until activated,
and when it activated
every soldier in the galaxy
performed the same action
at the same moment
and the action
tasted like a frequency
too low to hear
and too wide to dodge —
a single syllable
that turned loyalty
into a scheduled event
and the schedule
had been set
before any of them
were born

[Chorus]
I am the Senate —
you said it
and the sentence
was not a metaphor —
it was a diagnosis:
the institution
and the man
had become
the same structure
the way a vine
becomes the wall
it was planted against —
you cannot remove the vine
without removing the wall
and you cannot remove the wall
without admitting
the wall
was never holding itself up
You dismantled democracy
using democracy's own tools
which is the neatest trick
in the history
of imaginary civilizations

[Verse 3]
The lightning came from your hands
which is what the dark side offers:
the body
as a delivery system
for something
the body
was not built to carry —
your face collapsed
under the voltage
you kept generating
and the collapse
was not a cost
it was a receipt:
proof
that the power
had been running
through the wrong infrastructure
long enough
to renovate the landlord
You looked like
what you had been doing
which is a courtesy
most villains
do not extend

[Outro]
You came back —
somehow —
and the somehow
was never adequately explained
because adequate explanation
was never the point —
the point was this:
a system
designed around
a single architect
will rebuild itself
around the architect's return
the way a drawer
rebuilds itself
around the document
everyone agreed to shred
but nobody
actually burned
You are the document —
filed, forgotten,
and still
organizing the cabinet