People Watching

Old creature of habit
I’m rarely tamed
I walk and I walk
These streets paved with dog turds
And body juices
My memories
The happy ones
Of inanimate things
No not human ones
The human one’s gone.

I want passion & colour in my life
I’m so sick of this rubbish
All around me
Like you, definitely you
Why shout?
Shout louder and louder?
I’ll only listen less
Till I can’t hear you anymore.

She was in that hospital, barely alive
Gagging for some morphine
Her face all screwed up
Taken over by that growth
Creeping from her neck
Her withered face would soon be gone
Eaten up with the cancer
No energy left to call a nurse to beg to shut the curtains
The sun was too bright. No. She just wasted there in bed
Sun bleaching her eyes
They were both scrunched up shut
I leant over her, oh the smell. Terrible.
Smell of death, if death had a smell
That was it.

I love to pose
In expensive clothes
Made just to look
Like cheap ones.

Who’d come out today unless you had to
Going in the rain
Carrying the shopping
When nobody helps
I panic at it all
I’m always in a bad mood
Thinking “oh pack it in now!”

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About the Artist

Becky Fawcett is, at the moment, working in the media she normally hates: the labor-intensive, complicated, infuriating media of embroidery, tapestry, appliqué, and knitting. Why? Because she likes a challenge. She is also simultaneously working on media she loves: ink drawing and poetry, hence her current project People Watching, which began as a tour of the UK, observing people around her.

Along the way she began writing poems to accompany each person she drew, culminating in over 500 pictures and poems (at present!). As a linguistics graduate, writing was always her first love. The other media focus on man versus nature, with poetry again bleeding into the works.

Despite being a newcomer she has exhibited at The National Centre For Craft and Design (NCCD), this year’s Venice Biennale, The Edinburgh Fringe, has illustrations and poems archived at MoMA in New York, has presented the People Watching project at The Royal Academy in London and most recently performed the People Watching poems at a festival in London. Her achievements are surprising when you consider that she had a massive stroke, aged just 37, in 2012. She struggled to read and write and the damage to her brain has left her with dementia symptoms.

Her motto is, “We’ve all been sentenced to life and had better make the most of it.”