They Are The Meat

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"Now we move on to the story of Ezekiel, a prophet whom God humiliated by ordering him to eat only bread baked with human dung as fuel, and then to lie on his left side for thirteen months, after which Ezekiel has some really cool visions. After undoubtedly eating their own dung-infested food products, modern prophets use this story to prove the existence of flying saucers during biblical times."
– Mr. Skull's preamble at the Wormwood Fillmore shows

"They Are the Meat" (previously under working titles "Possum", "Arrows Drunk with Blood" and "Mountains of Meat") is a song by The Residents from their 1998 album Wormwood: Curious Stories from the Bible. It tells the story of the prophet Ezekiel's dreamlike visions symbolizing the siege of Jerusalem.

Album notes

YHWH humiliates Ezekiel by ordering him to eat only bread baked using human dung fuel and to lie on his left side for thirteen months. Ezekiel has some strange visions.
Look it up. Ezekiel 4:4-15, 8-11.

Live performances

The song was performed on the Fillmore Wormwood Live shows on October 1998, but was cut from the touring show in 1999. Despite this omission, "They Are the Meat" has been performed on a number of subsequent Residents tours, being the first of a 3-part suite of Wormwood songs on the 2005 The Way We Were mini-tour in Australia (sung by Molly Harvey), and remained on their setlist for the entirety of the Talking Light and Shadowland tours (2010-2011 and 2014-2016, respectively).

Lyrics

I was lifted up high
to a hole in the sky;
Where God told me to dig,
I found figures of pigs.

He put his butchers to work
with a competent clerk,
executing those who
had abandoned the truth.

Then four faces appeared
around the sides of a sphere,
spinning over a throne
made of amber and bone.

The ball was covered with eyes,
and as it started to rise,
God commanded the clerk
to take me back to the dirt.

With words harder than stone,
His voice followed me home
and said He was coming to eat
my cousins, who were his meat.

Appearances

• Wormwood (1998)
• The Way We Were (2005)
• El Año Del Muerto (2009)
• Talking Light Live in Rehearsal, Santa Cruz, California (2010)
• Talking Light Bimbo's (2011)
• Talking Light Live Downloads (2010 - 2011) _{(Various live recordings from 2010-2011, incl. ver. 7)}
• Wormwood Box (2022)

Contextual info

• Ezekiel