DECLAMATION PIECE TO PERFORM
No Pardon For Me
I'm sentenced.
Sentenced to life in this dank
cell
of misery.
I can see the key-
it hangs there,
just out my finger's reach,
dangling there in a mock of
freedom.
There will be no pardon for
me,
no stay of this execution.
My life has convicted me
for crimes I did not commit.
My penalty meted out.
I followed every rule,
broke no laws,
have more than paid my fines
to society's shun upon me.
There was no fair trial,
no chance for me to plead my
case.
The jurors were sent from
hell,
quick to judgement
and showed no mercy
as they read their verdict.
Life/Death, what does it
matter?
Its all the same in this prison.
I am but a mere victim,
the criminal has gotten away,
while I do the time
for fate's crimes against me.
I can't escape the hounds
they'd release,
should I attemp escape,
for the walls and barbed wires
are too painful to scale
and the hounds would scent
my fear.
So I sit here,
waiting...
waiting for the day they walk
me
that longest mile,
waiting for the flow of their
poison
to seep within' my veins.
That lethal injection
that will finally end this
misery
of a soul so wrongfully
convicted to die.
SPOKEN POETRY TO PERFORM

“One Art,” by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master” begins perhaps the

most famous poem by esteemed American poet Elizabeth
Bishop: “so many things seem filled with the intent to be
lost that their loss is no disaster”