The neon was bleeding through Los Angeles rain,
When a man in a tweed coat stepped out from the train.
He had failed as an oil-man, he’d drunk till he fell,
But he carried a language that few men could tell.
At fifty, Raymond Chandler picked up a new pen,
To rewrite the gutters and shadows of then.

He took the old detective, the cheap, pulp design,
And turned every sentence to poetry and wine.
His prose was like jazz in a smoke-flooded room,
A flash of bright lightning that severed the gloom.
“The streets were as dark as the night of a soul,”
He wrote of the city that swallowed men whole.

He created Philip Marlowe, the knight without shield,
Who walked through the muck where the rich never kneeled.
With a gag in his mouth and a hole in his coat,
And a cynical heartbeat that stayed at his throat.
But behind the hard boiled and the gunfire display,
Was a classical scholar who’d lost his own way.

× × ×

Yet the truth of his ballad, the anchor and wire,
Was a woman named Cissy, his ultimate fire.
She was eighteen years older, a scandalous grace,
With the youth of the century still on her face.
He loved her with passion that bordered on light,
Through the years of his drinking and typewriter night.

She was his Pearl Grayle and his Velma combined,
The only clean thing in his wandering mind.
When her health began failing, his world turned to rust,
And the poetry of Hollywood crumbled to dust.
He sat by her bedside and watched her grow cold,
The thirties and forties suddenly old.

When she died in the winter, he shattered in two,
And the long goodbye started, the only he knew.
He fired a pistol, but missed his own head,
For he was a ghost who forgot he was dead.
He drowned all his sorrows in gin and in grief,
With a typewriter ribbon that brought no relief.

× × ×

He left us the alleys where dark sedans wait,
The blonde who is deadly, the clock at the gate.
He taught the raw gutter to sing like a choir,
And wrapped the detective in classical fire.
The writer is quiet, the glass has run dry,
But his beautiful prose is a permanent sky.