The Child Knows

By Jack Joseph Smith

How you talk How you sin How you walk With a gun in your hand Better with a horse and a lasso How about the open sea You gotta chose the violent ship Further possibility with a North and South Pole Both on your own so cool Between the Earth and sky Most people have not seen God Still I'll bet it is true You Hobo streight up Like from Pittsburgh to Australia And end up where Heaven is vertical

Original Scan

Page 36

AI Interpretation

GPT

A poem about innocence and danger that imagines the child as already reading the violence, risk, and bravado of the adult world.

The poem keeps a folk-ballad energy while moving toward a stranger, more vertical idea of destiny.

Claude

How you talk, how you sin, how you walk — the child reads the adult world through its performances, and the poem insists that this reading is not innocent but already knowing. The child's knowledge is bodily: it registers in gait, in speech patterns, in the ways adults betray themselves through movement.

The folk-ballad rhythm (three-beat lines, simple diction) creates a nursery-rhyme surface over genuinely dark content — the form sings while the meaning watches.