Jimmy Daley

Jimmy Daley

Jimmy Daley was a baby in need

Of love, kindness and parental care;

His dad was a squirt of abandoned seed;

His mum was an addict who wasn’t there

When Jimmy was found outside a drug den

By social workers backed-up by police,

And driven away at the age of ten

As mum OD’d and found permanent peace;

Hers was a story not properly heard,

A statistic; a problem left too late

To alter the fate of a boy referred

To a children’s home funded by the state;

Foster carers saying he was too much,

And in need of more than a loving touch.

Jimmy Daley was a runaway teen;

Home was a future Panorama,

A tale of abusers; ignored, unseen;

A national scandal; a TV drama.

He was barely fourteen in ‘93

And he was sleeping in a shop doorway;

Hiding from the eyes of authority,

Stealing after dark and begging by day,

Till he was picked up and brought back again

By the local police, time after time,

To an institution of fear and pain;

A cycle of abuse and petty crime,

Leading to where it isn’t hard to guess;

Prison-wings, addiction and homelessness.

Jimmy Daley was a desperate man,

And his desperation grew all the more

When the local council enforced a ban

And he had to steal what he once begged for.

Who would give a job to a man like that?

An alcoholic without an address,

A thief, a junkie, a beggar, a rat,

A welfare scrounger, a permanent mess,

A man who you wouldn’t look in the eye,

Let alone talk to or have as a friend;

A scumbag, whose every word is a lie;

In short, he was labelled and in the end,

The labels prevented people seeing

An individual human being.

A homeless man froze to death in his sleep;

I read the story, took note of his name,

And thought about the things that people reap

When others sow seeds in life’s cruel game

Of winner takes all, or luck of the draw;

Harshness and indifference came to mind;             

It appeared to me, that his lot was poor,

And subject to things unjust and unkind;

The system never offered him a choice;

Who, with a conscience, can honestly say

Without doubt or irony in their voice;

That life is what you make it, come what may?

Jimmy Daley couldn’t make it a plan;

His life was finished before it began.