Liri's art and poetry were his musings about an abusive childhood. Some of them are very dark and troubled.

Maybe a memorial post could consist of pictures of him and some of his drawings and poetry. It could be made sticky. This means that it would remain at the top of some forum. That way he would be remembered.

Allen

pufferfish

I just saw this. I tend to forget sometimes all the people that are on here at MS, especially when they haven't posted for some time. At first Liri just sounded too familiar, and then looking back I remembered. All I can say is that I am sorry for the loss and I know he really struggled. He sort of disappeared in late 2008, and as it was said we often don't know what happens to people in online communities like this. I wish he could have gotten over his demons and am just sorry to hear the news. Yes, his therapy art photo work was really powerful. I had forgotten about them, but I remembered them instantly when looking at that past thread. I am glad to hear that others stayed in contact with him because I know things were tough for him. My condolences to friends and family, and Liri thanks for reaching out to/supporting me back in late 2008 (he had reached out to me over a tough issue I was having.) I really don't know what else to say, but I am saddened that he was hurting so bad. It is hard to say the right words. I hope there is some peace where he is at.

Eric

pufferfish- that would be invaluable to me, if you would like to share. if not i understand. (and sorry to be so long in responding.) [Jo]

i completely respect his choice to share or share not tut, and i mean him no disrespect. we grew up in different times and places. only in the last few years did we have the chance to glimpse each other as more of our true selves. there's a lot more intense emotion to it than that, but.

“How glorious it is - and also how painful - to be an exception.” ~Alfred De Musset

Hi, my brothers,

What a wonderful idea. A remberance of what this CSA stuff has cost in human life.

And what it has cost one of our other brothers here, whom was a treasured friend of his. M3..
Heal well, my brothers Allen, Ericc ^& staeving, soul, heal well.

Pete..Irishmoose.

A lot of Liri's art can be found online:

http://www.malesurvivor.org/board/ubbthr...0417#Post260417

Pictures of Liri and his friends:

http://www.malesurvivor.org/board/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=263545&page=1

Liri's Story
http://www.malesurvivor.org/board/ubbthr...ge=1#Post250677

Liri - adult in Seattle


Well, here we go. The story of my childhood through scanned photos. I put a lot of work into this project, because it is an important control issue for me. My parents were constantly taking pictures of me, especially my dad who also kiddie-porned me. He always was aiming a camera at me (except when he was aiming something else). By posting these pics here and telling the truth of what really went on behind the glossy prints, I hope I reclaim a piece of my childhood soul.


Liri at age 4. "This is the earliest pic I have. It was a camping trip with my parents and I remember it. A skunk was hanging around the night before. I loved being out in nature. This was before the abuse began."


Liri at age 7


Liri, age 7 (Liri's annotation: Notice the herpes outbreak beneath my lower lip. I caught it from my dad somehow.)


Liri age 8 (Liri's explanation: I spent a couple weeks every summer at my grandparent’s farm in the mountains. I enjoyed it for the most part, but they were strict Southern Baptists. Here I am chipping flint rocks on the patio with my nephew before going to Sunday school. 8 years old.)


Liri age 10 (Liri's explanation: Here I am in my grandparent’s basement. Notice the fundamentalist charts behind me.)


"On the ferry one Sunday. My dad abused me the night before. I remember feeling so sick and depressed that day."

Liri noted: "4th Grade. Head of the class and teacher’s pet. Gifted, talented and raped."

Liri and friends (Liri 2nd from left)
"Tenth birthday at the Japanese steak house. My favorite restaurant. My best friends."


Liri in his back yard. "The backyard of the house I live in from 3rd Grade until high school. We lived on 8 acres of wooded land on the outskirts of the suburbs. This is where most of my abuse happened. That’s my dog Taffy. She was super friendly and super stupid. I used to take out my aggression on her."


Liri's Therapy Project (Liri's Explanation: "This is a project I did in an art therapy group last year. The picture is of me at my Arrow of Light ceremony when graduating from Webelos. The bird necklace is something I've hung on to since I was a kid. That is my real baby hair, too")

Hi, my brother, Allen.

I,m crying right now, after looking at the pictures of Liri. Oliver Strummer & his art.

I for one didn't know him, then....But i do now.

I started knowing about him, when M3, had mentioned him.

From that point on, i considered him as another brother.

Another one of God's children destroyed, forever into eternity.

Thanks, Allen, my brother & heal well.

" I will take that lost boys hand, and i will lead him from the depths of darkness, into the sunlight, forever into eternity."

Pete..Irishmoose.

Liri's Art

Glue by Liri


Emergence by Liri


Prayer in the City by Liri


Orpheus by Liri


Luka by Liri


by Liri. Lost and Found.


Lost and Found by Liri



Explanation by pufferfish: Some of the Titles seem to be duplicated or mixed up. I will try to clear this up later.

LIRI'S POETRY (FIRST PART)


Liri as an adult living in Seattle



-----------------------------------------------------------
Liri's Statement:
Allen, this past year is the first time I've got seriously into visual art. I've always messed around with it, but I suck at drawing. One of the effects of my abuse has been that I keep a low profile and don't share my work publicly (art, poetry, writing, acting-- I also try to do electronic music, but I'm terrible). Recently, my work has dealt so much with abuse issues, I have a major fear of rejection and retaliation from people in my past. I'll be at a point where I change my name legally next year, so maybe that will help me feel safe enough to be more public. A new friend encouraged me to start reading my poetry at open mics again-- about eight years ago I started getting really bad tremors when I'd read in front of people, especially if the content was abuse related. My general social anxiety has improved dramatically over the past few months, so hopefully soon I will have the courage and confidence to give open mics another shot.

I also have a big problem with my ego. For my entire adult life, I've felt my creativity is all I had to hang onto. I hung my identity and worth entirely on being a poet. But now that I'm growing in so many areas of my life, maybe I'll stop feeling like I need to be the next 21st Century genius to be worthy of life on Earth.

I was raised to be a brilliant prince. I sort of lied in my survivor story-- I was raised in an upper middle class environment with all its privileges and entitlements. My parents expected me to fill this role and I became dependent on the attention I received by doing it. I blocked out the feelings of the abuse by being a little smart-ass precocious prince. I reveled in it.

I've asked myself recently-- do I want this to remain my role/archetype in life. Do I want to remain attached to this role my abusive parents pushed me into? Will my talent disappear if I give it up?

Yes, I want to give it up. I want to be a Healer. I want to be a Lover. I'm finding those roles to be much more gratifying, and paradoxically my creativity increases exponentially when I play the more positive roles.

-------------------------------------------------------


POETRY BY LIRI (OLIVER STRUMMER)

BLUEBLAXXX

-------------------------------------------------------
YE OLDE CURIOUSITY SHOPPE

These are the castings of a hermit, feverish;
The tangled nets of a drained sage,

Whose addled pages fill with a triangulated din,
A crescendo of jangled jetties, unduly charted.

A lighthouse’s circumference is a dead give-away
To the madness required to candle its swing.

A pelican never lies.
An urchin is not a spiky treat.

Upon these pendulant rocks,
Punks have died.
Night Train, high
Tide collide.
Orca off the starboard side.

Periscopic spies blink like serpents
As sea-lions take oaths to defend homebase.

We float now, a web of kale--
A failed gel upon a balding hell.

A sandpiper chances upon a bit of froth,
Last burblings of the Christ.

Sharks versus sharks versus sharks
Riding the gray crest of Armageddon.

Yum, that flakey taste of Blake, the big snapper.
Predictions: short splats on a long pier.

These are rorschachs from a soothsaying delinquent.
His spittle spawns neglect like salmon on a t-shirt.

This freshest catch of maritime revolt.

This is the piling the barnacles
Beat the sculpture park with.

The cabin boy’s secret
Is a stolen sextant.
A glimpse of his
Cunning is our souvenir.

---------------------------------------------------------

WORMHOLE


Relinquish the answer
You found yesterday
In dragonfly battles.

Your honeysuckle crown
Betrays an awkward glitch
At playing Pan
In a playground ditch.

Twin cliffs:
Opposite audigies
Bearing aquifers

Which feed a sniffled Utopia
Populated solely by petshop castaways
And various blacbloc gophers.

This is where a lyre was strung out
Of elven sorrow. At the fox of midnight
Your pine-thatched wrath
Plummets, stoked.

If love were a poison,
May this tincture deafen.

Bury the question with tonight’s trowel,
And awake from tomorrow’s thistled drowse.




---------------------------------------------------------
BURIED TREASURE

The staggered graph ascends,
All scribbles and cross-hatched smears.

Latch-key sewers:
A man, a hole, a rat, a bicentennial quarter.

In fact, an entire coin collection
In a small wooden chest, brass emblazoned—

Once, perhaps the necklace box
Of a Brahmin’s wife, now asphyxiated,

Now betrayed by a moonless jump. Loose
Junk. The jade sphinx was never hers,

Nor the splash of dolphins, zirconic.
The rats ate the diamonds. All the diamonds.

The bloody shredded sphincters
Of all the metropolitan vermin became

The candied crust, the ruby of
Betrayal and the riddle, the town bell,
Of a spun bottle of Cisco.

St. Kelson of the cranelit wharves
In a moonless age of arsenic.

The bluebloods in black towers,
Silicon badges pricking midnight,

Allowing the crude and the gore.
The slope’s slippery to the cathedral.

Clouds of singing rats bash the stained glass.
The treasure’s down in the subduction zone

Where new heroes of the quasar emboss
With their footsteps the mossy sidewalk,

Climbing almost out of reach of Rattus rattus
Into a halcyon extract gnashed by pigeons:

Murders, heists—
pandemic yawns.



---------------------------------------------------------

Rest in peace, my brother, Liri, rest in peace.

Your, brother,
Pete..Irishmoose.

LIRI'S POETRY (CONTINUED)


FREEDOM

Twisting in the sofa cushions:
Leather soft. Ryan petulant.
The scythe frays around the corner—
Why must every glint suffer an encryption?

Thursday night & the latchkey menace.
Fishsticks. Ketchup. Condominium.
Many prisons. Fewer prisms.
But no television. Wide nor flat.

Nothing but a screendoor slid across
The starfields. Ryan chucks his heart down
To the bluesman’s red-caped panther.
Don’t pant, we squirk in shorts— handclaps.

No. With zoot suits, gats,
Thanks be to Zeus, this Ganymede squirms
With a hipster’s phuture indecision thru
The western lands of his brandnew deathwish.



---------------------------------------------------------
DRAWBRIDGE

Once, as a child, I laughed—
But duct-tape solved that
Crisis. His lips parched
As Cairo. His heart, a Jakarta,
In my throat. Solvents caused,
Of course, that caustic effect and
Atlanta was always going to my groin.

Is it a pixel’s breadth
Or a chasmed chakra that swallows
Our Greenwich moon? And spits
Out Apollo, arrayed in favelas;
Spits him into ditches, glue-fed
And gummed by constellated tears?

Sparkling. Crippling.
The nursery’s apocalypse.
The glitched milk, the horses, the honey
On the livid drapes. Papers,

Wisteria dusted in memorial-- no wonder
Kerosene sears the eyes of
The Beloved. Small missives thru
Our veins, beckoned and thrilled
By Steeple-side dew.

Here at the cliff,
My automobile retrogrades.
This leather jacket cast off—
Sheening with neptunes in the sand.
As cymbals cascade into the wash,
Petroleum and lunar feather. Here,
Our shame is distilled
And the scent, iridescent,
Of basil and shame,
Becomes but distant mileage.

He couldn’t speak
Through the hours
Of duct-tape and rage. Oh, blue boy.
Oh, wisteria. Did you scythe the quiet
In a reversed machete song? Do you now
Curl into a flood of floods?

--------------------------------------------------------
POWER


I learned how power
Tastes like being

Disemboweled. Our
Bodies slung beyond

What we couldn’t very well embody.

This was Ryan’s
Newest truth.

There was something mangled in the corner.

From the ceiling cobwebs clung. Cottonmouthed,

A sock peeks out from under the couch. A pulse

Through this tongue collection. A rubber blur

Post-ignition.
Then they were on their bikes.

Pedaling thru layers of March wind.
Pedaling thru silence that thru us rushed.

One consummate instance posed:
Nothing future but exposure’s

ghosts.




--------------------------------------------------------

INHERITANCE

Shadows behind the breathing scars—
There is no mastery of technique,
When nerve gas is involved.
We mocked truth,
Fled under ignorance. Under
The attic stairs
Where the crucifix sleeps
In asbestos billows. Orpheus
Is stored as well, knotted up
In a garbage bag, temples thumping
Slightly against plastic.
The full moon burning through rafters—
Jehovah of the moths,
Brittle with the years,
Muted by hurricane waxes. Cortex
Of this tight nook, pulses
Like Bethlehem or Nagasaki;
And the continent between them,
Mapped in irritations of mimeograph.
So cold now.
Like a cylinder stuck
In an avine throat. Copy this
Croak, copy this cracking charm.
Xerox these serrated memories,
This corroded stationary.


--------------------------------------------------------

OH RYAN


Oh Ryan: wayward on the docks.
Oh Ryan: crippled in the cousinings.
Oh Ryan: vertigo and charm.
Oh Ryan: the marketplace throbs, suspicious:
Plow on thru, Ryan, big-wheel:
Gritty, aflame, heroic.
Oh Ryan: this world was never yours.
Ryan: so lucky and sassafras.
Ryan: sandbox anarchist, pellet of onyx.
Oh Ryan: this globe has cavities and matchstick
Men congregating, queuing-up long
For your raw sacred sugar,
Your crystalline exasperation,
Unwept and sweeping
With liquids and skeletons.
Oh Ryan: exploring betwixt stalactites:
Might, magic twine, electric torches,
And a taste for epic danger.
Oh Ryan: of the clenched teeth always.
Oh: they tricked you with a plastic treasure chest—
The pleasure forever spastic in your chest—
Secret guessed: tongue of lamb.
Oh Ruin: Oh Ryan:
Your castle has been decimated
For decades to come.


---------------------------------------------------------

AMNESIA


The shipwrecked will all
Re-enlist as cabin lads
In some teal navy. And pillows
Will be Ryan’s only fight left.

But now: turpentine, stale crust.
His war is just
Because. A trident,
Silver prongs, thrust.

My origins were also bowed
By wormwood and incident.
The time Chernobyl ruptured
Time ruptured and I got,
After an afternoon’s ellited
Activision, eroticated.

Now, Ryan & I glow upon the outcropping.
Straddling ledges as the freighters
Slip into amnesia, with an inherent
Sorrow, into the waterways.

Such a miracle to our aftermath,
The swallowing tugboat, keel
Congruent to the cranes all along
The dockyards, scrolling past
With nauts, legends, and lost names.



---------------------------------------------------------

AT THE CINDERBLOCK LIGHTHOUSE


1.

Who will sound again
The bell first rung
When recess was just
A microsaga-- a swingset
To be leapt from,
Into adulthood’s scolding
embrace?

As it slept in a bunkbed,
Dripping urine,
Floating dismembered,
Imagination:

Ours got fucked.

The mathematics prize vaulted away.

Nothing of you but a sticky snapshot

Creased across the
grain. Folded & quartered

Into my zipped pocket.
Now in the stewing black

Of a land laden with cobblestones &
ampersands.
Now I’m trancing

Over the tidal flats. Now I stab my childhood

In the back. Passion heaves. In the muck dead

Things agree.








2.

He came in from the sun—
Ryan Smilac, eleven and thunderstruck.
I was there all along, hiding
Like the photo folded in his pocket.

He came in from the gale to sit
In the sand, on the floor
Of my toolshed, crosslegged.
To let the whipping pines outside
Screen his grief from fierce Apollo.

I found him like a coin muted
In an inner pocket. His song
Glistening in secret. We shall become
An alchemy. As we sit, crosslegged,

With pillars of flame in all
Four upturned palms. Lifelines
Pulsing through the cool acoustics.
It is in this hush we found our
Anchor.

------------------------------------------------------------

RYAN'S CROWN


Going down to the library, I found it in Freeway Park

In Dad’s old brown briefcase, worn & mildewed.

Latch stuttered open: a nest of wide-rule homework &

Ryan’s cardboard crown, black & stapled; constructed

That arts-camp afternoon in rain. Across the brow,

The stroke & flake of sky-blue tempura, “TRUST”.

Eleven points in a tatter of silver stars. I couldn’t

Recall the coronation. Breeze came as I cradled,

Jagged. Dry with two decade’s dust, my lips

Traced forgotten fibers. I couldn’t resist--

It still fits.




--------------------------------------------------------
REVOLUTION IN YELLOW


The boy prince awoke
To a field of yellow in stereo.
It had been a long nightmare--
His eyes still shadowed,

But it was morning and the dew
Clung to his brow naked of crown
Weight. He propped himself up.
From the window: pelicans cycling.
Here is a new day.
Let us melt our sorrow
In butter sun and devour
Chocolate & cashews for breakfast.

This day-- fresh ground--
For a boy whose given robes
Were of deeper royal hues
Fringed with moon silver.

The yellow revolution advanced
On kitten breath. Monarchs
Might get bit
Before bedtime. As usual.

What remnants of innocence
Last night before he fell
Asleep after fellatio?
Or was it just naivety plunged

Into slumber? But the yellow now
Has all the hopes of lemon
Rinds that quench & kill
Teatime boredom.

Open your eyes wide, prince.
This empire needs the warmth
Of your watching. Your black crown,
Cradled on its blue velvet pillow,

Bloomed a fourth dimension
Over the cricket hours.
It shall shield you hereafter
From both mob & master.

Press the middle sapphire
And a hidden garden gate
Will swing a gap open in time
For your escape into these headphones

The crown also grew. So hark these exquisite
Loops that carve the air
Into humming fractals.
Loops that curl the air




Like strumming minstrels.
Hearts that swoop thru air
Like plummeting kestrels.
Hoops of nerves netting air!

Blue prince : Black crown
----Yellow background----
A synesthetic throne.
A scepter of amaryllis.

Do not bow to him--
Less grovel more rock.
Do not kiss his slipper--
It creeps him out.

He only wishes he could smell
The textures of your inner loops.
He only wants to touch that sprig
Of rosemary in your mind.

This is the Theatre of Wonder.
The only humility is in awe.
The only cruelty is patronage.
This castle stage is gelled

Together with strobes & synchronicity.
The universe rules
When to pull
The curtain,
when to drowse
the canopy.

The prince coughs at your censers
Of sativa & poppy. The levity
Of echo & clover sustain him
Pretty purely. Freely. So, play:

Play, Ye Kelsonic Sages!

Play loops and subtle filters!
Play the joy from your shedding scars!

Play for this boy who gushes stars.

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