The Gift That Ate the Giver (Prometheus)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You were a Titan
which means you were old enough
to know better
and you stole fire anyway —
not because you wanted it
but because you watched them down there
in the dark,
eating raw meat with their bare hands,
shaking in the cold,
and the part of you that could see the future
saw nothing in theirs
unless you opened the drawer
the other gods had marked
do not distribute

[Verse 2]
You carried it down in a fennel stalk —
that's the part nobody lingers on:
the container was a hollow plant
and the cargo was the beginning
of metallurgy, cooking, medicine,
architecture, war, the combustion engine,
the nuclear age, and the specific warmth
of a child's hands held
near a hearth in December
All of civilization in a tube of dried grass
which is either
the greatest act of compression
or the most dangerous thing
anyone has ever done with a weed

[Chorus]
Zeus chained you to the rock in the Caucasus
and sent an eagle every morning
to eat your liver
and every night the liver grew back
because you are immortal
which means the punishment
was not the eating
but the growing back —
the anterior cingulate cortex
registers the anticipation of pain
more acutely than the pain itself
and you had eternity
to anticipate each morning
which means your real sentence
was not the liver
but the night before

[Verse 3]
The humans took the fire
and built everything
and burned everything
and they did not look up at the mountain
where you were chained
because gratitude
is the shortest-lived currency
in any civilization
and you knew that too —
you could see the future,
which means you saw
the forges and the furnaces
and the cities that would light themselves
and never once say the name
of the god who is still paying
for the match

[Bridge]
Heracles shot the eagle eventually —
untied the chains, helped you stand —
but the myth never tells you
what you did next
because the rescue
is not the point of your story
The point is the interval:
the centuries of liver and eagle,
the dark hours between feedings
when the growing back
was the worst part
because it meant
the morning would come again
and the eagle would find you repaired
and ready to be opened

[Outro]
Every scientist in this album
has been chained to something —
a hypothesis, a data set,
a committee, a century
that wasn't ready for them
But you were the first
and you did it on purpose
and the fire is still burning
in every hearth and engine
and mushroom cloud
and the eagle comes every morning
for everyone
who has ever given the world
something the world
was not built to be trusted with
The drawer you opened
was not yours to open
and it was the only act
that ever mattered