SLAMMERS - Akeem, Nkechi, Jonathan, Siaara, Eric, Ryan.

Cleveland's youth poetry slam team is tired of what everyone else thinks of them. You could hear this as they erupted last week at Playhouse Square's Idea Center theater in their final performance before the trip to Washington, DC for the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam competition. The performance began with a team piece, all six members trading lines that foretold what was to come from each of them, in the way that an overture foretells the melodies of an opera. Poem after poem protested the treatment of gays, blacks and fat people, or the irresponsibly fantastic images of women that confront young girls every day, or the torment imposed by broken families, both on individuals and entire neighborhoods.

They're even tired of the surprise that comes when they defy expectations, expectations inevitably rooted in their race or the fact that they live in the inner city. Sarcasm drips from their mouths as Jonathan Lykes and his teammate Akeem Rollins deliver "Equality 666." "U speak so well while spitting that spoken word. You're so articulate and clean," as if it should be a surprise that a black kid speaks well and bathes. So the poets repeat the line, "And they say the subject is getting old."

"These are very popular subjects in these competitions, every one of them," says Lykes, 18, of Shaw High School in East Cleveland. "A lot of the issues are the same. The competition becomes about how good you are at expressing it."

The Cleveland Youth Poetry Slam team formed out of competitions sponsored by Playhouse Square, starting in January. Members are Lykes; RyanAustin Dennis, who just graduated Copley High School; Nkechi Edeh and Siaara Freeman, both of whom just graduated Brush High School; Eric Odum, who will enter his final year at Cleveland School of the Arts in the fall; and Akeem Rollins, a student at Tri-C. They've been coached by Cleveland slam masters Michael Salinger and Q-Nice.

In both adult and youth competition, political issues have dominated slam poetry in recent years because the content has been successful. Delivering a righteous point with rhetorical muscle has been an effective way to seize the judges' attention and, in the three minutes allowed in competition, carve out places in their memories, the better to score, the better to win.

The young poets from Cleveland work the style with literate virtuosity as their free verses stand up for themselves and others. In "The Coalition," Eric Odum eventually identifies himself as straight, but only after mocking the gay-haters: "Why is it funny to say homo, or to say that something's gay? How can gay be an insult? That's just like saying, that car's so black. Or look at his shirt, that's so Asian. Or damn, don't be so Hispanic about it."

In "My Substance," he verbally winks and laughs with hip-hop hubris as he makes a double entendre between weight and intellect. "You must be mad that in a winter storm I could live for days while your bony ass would be frost-bitten within minutes. My substance, no, no not my extra skin or the layer that you call fat. See, my intellect was too much for my head so my brain is stored in my body. Imagination flows so heavily that I can't express it all so I retain it like water."

Lykes alludes to Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 130 in a poem about standards of feminine beauty that begins, "My girlfriend was not the best thing I ever placed my eyes upon."

In her poem "Understanding," Siaara Freeman drags imagination through the pain of race relationships. After framing a diner scene, she proclaims, "I want to talk to this clocked parasite/take the icy rage from his eyes and place it in my coffee/let it mix with dotty's spit/then sip, slowly/so I can taste prejudice./I want to understand why my great-grandmother would never truly trust a white woman/and why me and Katy's friendship surprised her so. I need real racism to run through my veins/and not the diluted version of merely being followed in a store./I need to know this hatred so I can appreciate love."

In "Froze," Nkechi Edah describes the pressure on a Muslim girl in a Catholic school. "And she knows that her skin is not classified as black/her classmates call her a terrorist/and every time they ask if her father is one too, she cannot contain her tears."

Not all their work is so heavy. Freeman and Lykes perform a poem called "The Nineties," which is a catalog of nostalgia from the decade of their childhood, including ancient technology like the VHS, and primitive dances like the Running Man and the Cabbage Patch. The poem's serious note takes the form of a brief lament — that "we are the last generation who will actually be able to recall what real hip-hop is."

What that means is that they are looking for more substance and introspection than commercial hip-hop provides. As Rollins says, "Back in '80s and '90s, hip-hop would be about real things. People would write about crack on the streets, or love, about real subjects that are really happening to them. Our team is mostly tired of the "hip-hop is dead' poetry. But hip-hop really is dead because it's not talking about the real things anymore. People talking about how they're ballers and have a bunch of money and hos and all that. It's okay if you're doing all that, but how did you get there? People used to write about that stuff. They don't anymore."

At least the rappers don't. And in that sense, especially for that last generation of kids who remember when hip-hop was something more, slam poetry is filling a void. Society's constant judgement and deck-stacking against minorities has not gone away, and so the poets keep at it. The Cleveland youth slam team's work is a window on the city and on the kids' lives, a little like reading an eloquent and very personal newspaper focused more on truth than fact. And that's what they're taking to Washington.