Blue Crawford found me in my early twenties. Two good heartbreaks and one mighty case of alcoholism slumped down beside me in Rome, Georgia. The front stoop looked out over nothing. Summer. Hot. I didn’t sit on the back porch because it faced an asylum. Every day, if I was caught out back smoking, the patients looked at me and I at them with an eerie connectiveness – a shared “otherneess”.
So, as a morose 22-year old I wrote “Faulkner and My Lovely Liquid Lady” that later shortened in title to “Judas Noose Tavern”. A poem about the descent and sitting in addiction, it was “my first” of the genre. I never wrote a great deal of poetry until much later.
Prose was my first love. Fiction and humorous nonfiction dominated my you and teen years. Telling stories and making people laugh kept them at a comfortable distance. I tucked my neurodivergence behind my imagination and sense of humor. In that vast space those on the spectrum create to carve a quiet palace for only us – in those vast, biolumenscent caverns are a universe.
Why does any of this matter to The Salvation of Cowboy Blue Crawford? Because the poem concerning alcoholism, stumbling into poetry, and a hyper-intense sensibilty about the world around me sat me still kone evening in Rome, Georgia to know ‘ole Blue.
Blue Crawford came up here. Still comes back here. There’s a Pinterest page to his adventures. (You know the shit is real now.) Interviewed about him the last decade as if he’s real. Then the complicated questions around how someone not fully formed or imbued with prupose takes up so much attention? What makes him stick?
His friends. His spite and fear and gnashing of teeth, pulling hair, good western, Bible-riding, mythology spinning at the edges, man and his friends. Gun fights. Good ones, though – not the ones that insist upon themselves. Long prose pieces play out the thaloc Blue Crawford tracks far, far away from Louisiana. A jewel and immortality to claw and carress and dress with bullets forever, if that’s what it takes, to cach Riz LeCroix. That’s the serious bit.
The piece earns attention and the attention urges my friends to nudge me to finish the damn thing. I didn’t back in my early years because I didn’t have the mileage. The hurt, addicted, first-inducted “me” wasn’t road tested. Too moody and unsure. Livewires weren’t grounded, and barely more today.
Yet, today, I pull out of the shade and bring Blue’s crew to face Riz in the streets hot across Texas to the tip of Florida. The story talks through action. The action tells the love story. The love story isn’t tropish or gagged in leather. Best friends are amalgamated and holy men with father figures melded into a giant. There’s a samuarai. A demon, too.
The blog is back up. I’ll talk more about Blue to cue me into the fact: Do it or shut up about it.
Along with these updates there will be craft talks and side stories about life. Writing journals doesn’t appeal to me. Once my first book released and I realized the guilt-free purge poetry allows, going back to private pages felt fake. Blue Crawford is the man removed from fake.
He is the real one.