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 basketball 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 school 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 noon 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

Neighborhood basketball leads through lost athletic promise, ethnic street life, a father's parkinson's and memories of horses and the Harlem Globetrotters.

The speaker connects watching and deliberate touch to the ways people learn to move through a block. Family memory remains qualified by Maybe it's true and Maybe it's not; the Garden's exact location is not established.

Claude

Across five pages the poem advises 'Watch yourself, and listen to the bricks', pictures a ten-year-old playing basketball 'behind the school' at 'the line of two towns / within a town', and catalogues a block where young men are 'Kicked out of collage' and men read 'the newspaper at noon'. The speaker says 'I: had a father who was a ringmaster', recalls basketball as 'fine tuned freedom' and Goose Tatum 'At the edge of the racetraek', and ends where the hoops were beneath the bleachers 'on the Wabash'.

Neighborhood lore, family memory and basketball run together in quick cuts, and the hedge 'Maybe it's true / Maybe it's not' keeps the family stories open. Quoted street speech is kept in the raw language of the period, and source spellings such as 'spaned' and 'racetraek' are preserved.