Death Star

Lyrics

I am a doctrine. I am a moon.
I am the shadow that enters the room.

They built me to be the end of the argument,
a sphere of gray logic to shadow the sky.
I swallow the vacuum, I carry the order,
and millions of officers live in my spine.
But I have a million men walking my hallways,
like white blood cells pacing a terminal ghost.
I cannot feel them. The scale is too heavy.
I am a body ignoring its host.

And I am afraid of the very small things.
I am terrified of the dust.
When you are a mountain of orbital armor
you cannot turn around to see what you touch.
My mind takes a full second to reach my equator.
I cannot flinch, and I cannot fold.
I am a god in a cage of my gravity,
waiting for a pebble to bring on the cold.

I shattered a world just to prove I was waking.
Green glass and ashes, adrift in the night.
They cheered in the overbridge, patted my plating,
but I couldn't feel the absence of light.
There is a trench on my northernmost surface,
a two-meter shaft leading down to the heat.
That is the only place I am still open,
a flaw they forgot in the durasteel sheet.

And I am afraid of the very small things.
I am terrified of the dust.
When you are a mountain of orbital armor
you cannot turn around to see what you touch.
My mind takes a full second to reach my equator.
I cannot flinch, and I cannot fold.
I am a god in a cage of my gravity,
waiting for a pebble to bring on the cold.

They fly through the vacuum like gnats in a canyon.
My turrets are turning, too sluggish, too blind.
I was designed to look down at a continent.
I wasn't made for the things left behind.
The little wings crossing the grid of my vision,
the sting of the laser, the tick of the clock.

I am too big to swat at the mosquito.
I am too vast to reach for the wound.
I feel the heat falling down in the dark.
I cannot close my eyes.
I just have to sit here and take it.