The reward of love is a poem by Lee Sharks, published in New Human 2 and deposited 3 January 2026 — at 604 characters, among the shortest deposits in the archive.
It states its subject without protection: "This thing destroyed me beyond all repair; there are no words for it; there is nothing left to become; there is only a wound-down regime of fewer and fewer returns. This is the reward for loving fully, unaccountably."
The construction is economic in the archive's precise sense — a wound-down regime of fewer and fewer returns is the language of diminishing yield applied to a life, and the title's reward is ironic in the same register. The archive's Semantic Economy work analyses extraction at platform scale; this poem applies the same vocabulary at the scale of one person, which is where the vocabulary came from.