No Harm No Foul

By Jack Joseph Smith

Watch yourself, and listen to the bricks and trees if you can; this inparticular, when you have no father, have no mother There you are bewildered, a part of the herd Or now you are alone, you think You link things one way and another It is all about what is left to do Your ten years old and playing pasketball behind the school At the line of two towns within a town Ballplayers come from all over the city to shoot the hoops like hawks and crows While the spaned ages played cards on what we see asswhiped on left green grass
Young men dealing with their talents Kicked out of collage, losing the athletic grant From the fifties until now No blood,. no foul Men avoiding life And hanging around a grade sehool Yet down what is left of any street that's tight The way you walk too And walk away and view The way you are and the way it is says cool There are no incidentals on your block The barber shop More than hardware More than drugstore More than music More than booking a number Mild shakes, and truck stops without trucks
Hair dressers, definately French Italians, Jews, and Greeks; they are leaving with the forecast, but they are aware, that they don't have anything better to appreciate Hey negro, I remember Jews saying Heb, just to get along Let's make mention Let's look through the window Let us notice those men reading the newspaper at noom Their silence and presence let us make childhood a circus And I had a father who was a ringmaster But I was not taken for granted
Again the fifties until now. The sense of humor The responsibility to laughter The conjunction between basketball as fine tuned freedom And the professional watching every move they make Inbetween What do I create My father's parkinson's translated to my deliberate touch It took me to a barefoot twenty six on the Venice cement, California court From the street, such as it may be Go to the end of romance Goose Tatum lived in the barn
At the edge of the racetraek Where my Father feed horses as an Indiana river kid Maybe it's true Maybe it's not When: at ten years old I was at the Garden's Watching the Harlem Globetrotters And it sure seemed that Rusty, the old man and Goose Knew each other pretty well So I say I have seen that ownership of the ball Where the hoops were beneath the bleachers Way down there, on the Wabash

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

A long neighborhood poem about basketball, class, ethnicity, fathers, watching, and the social worlds that teach a person how to move through danger.

The poem is one of the collection's richest community pieces: street life, sport, humor, and memory all become forms of moral training.

Claude

Basketball here is not metaphor but curriculum — the court is where you learn to watch yourself, listen to bricks and trees, and survive without parents. The poem's five-page sprawl mirrors the long education of a street game: patience, improvisation, and the knowledge that fouls go uncalled in the neighborhoods that need rules most.

The opening instruction ('Watch yourself, and listen to the bricks and trees if you can') is addressed to a fatherless child, which transforms the basketball court from recreation into the only available moral classroom.