WHERE DID THE CLEVELAND AVENUE WARRIORS GO?

It usually starts out as a feeling, an elusive, emotional sense of anxiety, the urge to get out and away, to break free from some small town or some mid-sized town or even the stifling confines of a couple big city blocks, where the faces blur into familiarity and the expectations for something new and different are bleak.

Songs for the Cleveland Avenue Warriors, a poem presented in 10 parts(from the recently released collection, Songs For The Cleveland Avenue Warriors: poems from the past, present and future, available from creativeonionpress.com), embodies this sense of impending pressure. 

It builds. It grows. It finally settles in, like a slowly descending storm front, and smothers; this adolescent urge to get up and go, to move around, to 'walk about'.

It hits hardest for the dreamers, those who know that there is so much more to know, who connect the dots that lead out from their doorstep and stretches on out and soon becomes entwined with global politics, beholden to the economists who view small town residents as no more than lesser chess pieces, pawns meant to graduate from the local high school after lettering in microfractures and CTE, one tackle at a time, turning attentions inward while dreams of pro potential keeps even the brokest of them distracted by the chance to rise up from the wrong side of the tracks.

That's where the Cleveland Avenue Warriors would gather round and swing for the fences, waiting on their chances to strike it rich, get out, move on up; like the Jeffersons.

    *side note- I sat and sipped 'shine with a group of old-timers, lost to time, forgotten names on championship trophies gathering dust in high school auditoriums. Record holders, state champs back in the 50's, 60's, 70's, they lined up after graduation to work in the hotel kitchens and on the factory floors that didn't care for their athletic careers, bussing tables and melting iron for the bosses who once lined up on Friday nights to watch them play and cheer for their abilities and dream of hiring them away someday so that they could brag and say amongst themselves that they had a state champ doing their dishes or working as a foreman; only for the good times to end as their benefit packages were shipped over seas and the closure notices began to appear on the closed doors of the once-booming factories. The dope game replaced the potential and America's addiction was played out across the country in living rooms and kitchens, on its street corners and in its crumbling institutions. Leaving the best of them behind to reminisce and regret that their sons and daughters are left to scrabble around in disgrace, chasing the pensions that the Boomers refuse to acknowledge is now missing.

Some get out, go on to escape the gravity well that swirls around their childhood homes, that has captured their friends with the familiarity that keeps their feet cemented to the concrete of the basketball courts in neighborhood parks or parked at bar stools or in the back of the police cars that patrol the streets and snares both the criminal and the unaware.

Escape though is relative. A good drug binge can also ease the pain of lost momentum and provide a way to get away from the darkest places and prepare for what's next and the realization that it's still likely to get so much worse than this.

So, what's left when the whole town has seen one another at their worst? When the whole block looks down and away when the broken pass by with a tarnished glow and no one seems to know how to redeem those who eventually succumb to the inevitable?

Just where did the Cleveland Avenue Warriors go?