Forlorn,  
pining for a mother  
that cast you off into a  
Promethean world of torturous grinding.  

What cruel hand plopped you down  
in a festering lake of blood  
to plod incessantly behind the dead tree,  
so near the cliff face?  

How does it feel to have a life worth 11k runes?   

At first, so precious to those who collect them, 
but a value diminished over time,  
until it feels more like work and less like play. 

Paul Shovlin is deeply invested in the belief that poetry should be reclaimed by the masses and applied to even the most mundane aspects of human experience. His fiction has appeared in Gramarye: The Journal of the Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction and three of his poems (about AI and robots) will be published in an anthology in the summer of 2024 by Middle West Press.