#ourangelismoamayourrain #charlesbukowski #afnalbantoglu #poetrybaba - I've seen dogs with more style than people And dogs don't have much style Cats have plenty of style Charles Bukowski - Charles Bukowski poems Okay, My Baby, We Don't Have Angels; But We Have Rain Call it the greenhouse effect or whatever you want, it just doesn't rain like it used to. The rains during the Great Depression come to mind especially. There was no money, but there was lots of rain. It DID NOT RAIN on one night or one day, it DID rain for 7 days and 7 nights, and Los Angeles's rain grates were not made to absorb that much rain and the rain would come down THICK and STERIOR and REGULAR and you would HEAR the drops hitting the roofs and running down to the ground in gutters and HAIL and big boulders of ICE exploding and flying through the air; and the rain would simply NOT STOP and all the roofs would leak - pots and pans laid out all over the house and the TIP TIP sound would spread throughout the house; and the containers were emptied and emptied and emptied again. The rain would run over the sidewalks, through the gardens; and it would climb the stairs and enter the houses. There were washcloths, bath towels, and the rain would often come in through the toilets: the streets would be foaming, brown, with little whirlpools and beat-up cars, cars that wouldn't start on a sunny day, and the unemployed men would look out their windows at the death throes of those old cars that looked as if they were alive; the unemployed, the defeated people of a defeated time, would be locked in their houses with their wives and children and cats and dogs. The cats and dogs would refuse to go out and would leave their droppings in strange places in the house. The unemployed men would go mad at being stuck in the house with their once beautiful wives. There were terrible arguments as the foreclosure notices were put in the mailboxes. The rain and the hail, the cans of peas, the bland bread; fried eggs, soft-boiled eggs, hard-boiled eggs; peanut butter sandwiches, and an invisible chicken in every pot. my father, who was certainly no good man, would beat my mother every time it rained, at best, and I would throw myself on them, legs, knees, screaming, until they were torn apart. 'Kill you,' I would shout. 'If you hit me one more time I'll kill you! ' 'Get this son of a bitch out of here, quick! ' 'No, Henri, stay with your mother! ' Yes, all the houses were under siege, but I suppose the terror in our house was above average. and at night when we tried to sleep it would continue to rain, and in the dark, as I watched the moon blurred by the rainwater through my window, which was bravely resisting the water from entering my room, I would imagine Noah and his Ark coming again, I thought. We all thought that. and then, suddenly, the rain would stop. it always stopped around 5 or 6 in the morning, peace would descend everywhere, but not completely because the tip tip tip sound would still continue and then the fog and smoke would clear and at 8 a.m. a blinding bright yellow sunlight would fall on the earth, Van Gogh yellow—crazy, blinding! and then the gutters that had escaped the downpour would begin to expand in the sun: PENG! PENG! PENG! and everyone would get up and look outside the gardens that were still taking in the rain were greener than they had ever been and the birds were chirping like crazy in the gardens, the birds that hadn't had a decent meal for 7 days and 7 nights and were tired of eating seeds and would wait for the worms to come up to the ground, the half-suffocated worms. The birds would first pull the worms out of the ground and lift them up into the air and then stuff them into their stomachs; there would be blackbirds and sparrows. The blackbirds would try to drive the sparrows away but the sparrows, mad with hunger and smaller and faster, would get their share. men would stand on the porch smoking cigarettes, knowing that now they would be going door to door looking for a job that they would probably never find, trying to start their cars that would probably never start. and their once beautiful wives would go into the bathroom and comb their hair and put on their make-up and try to put their worlds back together, trying to forget the terrible unhappiness that had gripped them, worrying about what to make for breakfast. and the radio would say that school had started. and then there I was on my way to school again, with great puddles of water on the road, the sun like a new world above me, my parents in the house, and I had arrived at school on time. Mrs. Sorenson greeted us with, 'There's no recess today, the ground's too wet.' the children shouted 'AOF!' 'But we're going to do something very different during recess,' she said, 'and something very enjoyable!' we all wondered what this very enjoyable thing was and what th