"Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death" tasks audiences with witnessing a strategically curated assemblage of a checkered U.S. history of police brutality, promotions of church gospel, distilled expressions of dejection, perseverance for social change, beatific song and dance, and other acts of Black performativity and expressivity in all its awesome variety.
My love was bound in red silk,/ Thrust out forcefully to claim long-forgotten aristocratic titles/ When the ships of old have/ Taken on the air for water/ And it is blood they inhabit, not the/ Sweat falling