OTHER | Charles Mauleverer

Poetry

Selected Poems

A Poem Not Written By A.I. - December 2025

Give me the ones with blood in their veins

Who know what it means to care

For a toddler, a tree, a tombstone, a train

And a family feast to share

Give me the physical, lyrical, quizzical,

Warmth in a fiancée’s eyes,

An atypical, liveable, mystical miracle;

Don’t give me your A.I.

Sure, let it search, let it do the mundane

So to leave me more time to spare,

Fold bedsheets and proteins, sift code and grain,

Solve all that there is in healthcare

But let it not touch the artistic display,

Or the sound of a baritone voice,

Or the gut-wrenching sculpture of moulded clay,

Or the home magazine of choice,

Or the film or the photo or novel or play,

Or the set designs for a show off Broadway,

Or the curve of a line in a corps de ballet

Any heart with a beat would rejoice

With relentless thirst for power pursued

You’ll be making millions cry,

While stealing their scraps of work and food

For your insatiable data supply

Being not richer or wiser or more at ease

Ought to beg the question why

We don’t just allow this death-march to freeze,

And stop a ruthlessly spreading disease,

And stop the maniacal need to appease,

And stop.

Just please stop.

And just,

Please,

Don’t give me your A.I.

A Letter to Kindred Spirits in the Arts - February 2021

There are others

With you

Sharing your tender sense

That among the rarest and colossallest expressions of existence in art and music and words

Might be those written by people like you

People who

Might not ever have survived a tussle in the sands of our screaming digital colosseum

And worse

Whose very works might now be trodden and forgotten

Beneath the decrepit denarius-a-dozen sandals of the deadly marketeers

Influencers - February 2021

When we are old

Will the obituaries be filled

With influencers?

The Realist - October 2023

You know don’t you

Very, very, very deep within

You know

You will always carry that bleakest stamp on the passport of your heart:

‘I gave up on love’

You travel on regardless, scouring and scorching the earth, crossing the seas, wreckages in your wake, seeking entry to lands you call ‘stability’, ‘reassurance’, even, ‘realism’

Did any live by their name?

Did any nourish the remnants?

Did any know you?

Or did you find everyone, everywhere, everything, even yourself, to be desolate?

Another discarded, mendable heart shall ever grow and never know

And you

You don’t know you

Art passers-by - November 2023

Into the gallery with clacking feet

Craving acknowledgment from adjacent ears

Glancing down an upturned nose

Only the placards catch her eyes

And not the works of blistered hands

And bleeding minds

And bludgeoned hearts

Which hang around ignored like abattoir corpses

Only their names would pass her lips

And not the test - she stiffens her back

And not her resolve to open her soul

Nor her miserly wallet, nor her constricted brain, nor her livid-indigo-greige irises

To the limitlessly enriching possibilities of the unknown