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Pip: Welcome to osoparavos.com, where the sidewalk has opinions, the body files formal complaints, and the city never once asks how you're doing.

Mara: This episode draws on a recent collection by Adam Donaldson Powell — poetry and prose in Nynorsk that moves through aging bodies navigating streets, the machinery of modern life, identity, and what it costs to keep going.

Pip: Let's start with the poems themselves — old men, crutches, and the quiet arithmetic of crossing a block.

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Old Men Walking, Cities Not Watching

Mara: The anchor poem in this collection is "Gamle Mann Går" — Old Man Walks — and it maps a single crossing of a city block as an act of sustained negotiation. Every obstacle is a decision, every crack in the pavement a question the body has to answer.

Pip: The poem puts it this way: "Han måler ikkje avstand i meter / men i avgjerder: / dette steget, så det neste, / stopp, balanse, juster, / eit privat rekneskap over å overleva." He doesn't measure distance in meters, but in decisions — a private accounting of survival.

Mara: What that means in practice is that the city isn't hostile so much as indifferent. Joggers, children, dogs on leads — none of them are obstacles in any intentional sense. The poem's tension is that the world simply moves at a speed that doesn't account for him.

Pip: And that indifference is doing a lot of work. The city "durar vidare, rastlaus og likesæl" — keeps going, restless and indifferent — while he measures every return step as a new journey, because fatigue reshapes distance.

Mara: "Å gå blodproppen" — Walking the Blood Clot — takes that same body and adds a medical dimension. Doctors couldn't cut it out, couldn't dissolve it, couldn't promise tomorrow. So the man walks it three times a day instead, cane marking time against pavement.

Pip: The cane gets a proper job description in that poem. Not surrender — "eit tredje bein, / eit stativ for samanfallande imperium." A third leg, a stand for a collapsing empire. That's a more dignified CV than most furniture gets.

Mara: And the poem places him in a longer history — AIDS activist, miracle survivor, a man whose face once appeared on posters. Now he composes Beat-inflected lines in his head while walking, because, as the poem puts it, poetry works better than whiskey and better than the pills that leave him half-dead on the sofa at four in the morning.

Pip: The collection also includes "Overgjeving" — Surrender — a set of four haiku-scale verses on surrender to love, to self, to life, and to death. Short, clean, no argument. Then "Ver her no" — Be Here Now — which turns inward: a small fire held steady inside a body that keeps filing complaints.

Mara: "Ver her no" is the one that names what all these poems are circling. The speaker says the mind escapes when the body gets too loud — "glir sinnet mitt fri / som ein fugl som flyktar frå røyk" — glides free like a bird fleeing smoke. And in that freedom, there's no diagnosis, no warning lights beneath the ribs. Just movement and breath.

Pip: Then "Epitafium" asks what should actually remain. Not the books, not the manifestos, not the questions. What it asks to be measured by is quieter: hands held without witnesses, forgiveness given late but given anyway, the fragile courage of opening up again after everything.

Mara: "Kjære Kropp" — Dear Body — shifts register entirely. It's a direct letter from mind to body, acknowledging decades of poor communication, guilt-tripping, and mutual stubbornness. The tone is reconciliatory: can we accept ourselves as we are and enter this new phase with dignity?

Pip: It's the most generous performance review a body has ever received after years of being told to stop complaining.

Mara: The poem also folds in shorter prose-poem fragments — "Ein Vakker Ting" on the elegance of a mind beginning to lose itself, "Heimkomsten" on a body navigating an airport on autopilot, and "Då og No" on the shift from urgency to intention. Together they build a portrait of aging not as decline but as a change in rhythm.

Mara: That rhythm — body, city, time — carries directly into the longer urban poems, where the street becomes something much larger.

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The City as Cage, the Cage as City

Pip: "Tenk deg" — Imagine — is the collection's longest and most ambitious piece, and it opens at 04:13 in the morning with a city that never actually goes quiet. The ventilation hum, the sirens, the TV preacher baptizing the sleepless through static walls.

Mara: The poem sets its terms early: "Høyr — byen er aldri stille. / Sjølv stilla her / har ein ventilasjonssurr." Hear — the city is never silent. Even the silence here has a ventilation hum.

Pip: And from that hum, the poem builds outward — through Grønland and Tøyen, through the addicts and pickpockets and cats who, the poem insists, know everything, to the glass towers a few blocks west where the streets widen and even the wind behaves differently.

Mara: The structural move the poem makes is to show that the enclosure doesn't disappear when you add carpet and climate control. A penthouse is still a cage. The difference is the decoration: some line theirs with ivy, some with gold, some with nothing but a mattress and the stubborn refusal to disappear.

Pip: "Buret er vakkert; løgna er stygg" — The Cage is Beautiful; the Lie is Ugly — takes that image and turns it into a full indictment. Where "Tenk deg" observes, this poem argues. It traces how a culture taught people to sand themselves down to sellable silhouettes, to document sunsets rather than watch them, to optimize sleep cycles while marriages quietly rotted.

Mara: The poem is direct about the mechanism: "Ei befolkning som hatar seg sjølv / er lett å selje til." A population that hates itself is easy to sell to. The insecure are compliant consumers. The exhausted don't revolt.

Pip: But it doesn't end there. Something stubborn survives — a primitive ache for joy that can't be purchased, for faces allowed to age like honest landscapes, for love untouched by transaction.

Mara: "Somnambul Vinter" — Sleepwalking Winter — moves through the same territory more lyrically, tracing a speaker who walks through a frozen season in a kind of suspension, then thaws into summer, then watches autumn release its colors before preparing to walk the same road again. It's the city-and-body theme in seasonal form.

Pip: The poem "ordbuffeten" — the word buffet — offers the collection's lightest moment: a speaker navigating the delicatessen of language, picking up fifty-dollar words that trip him up, eyeing the forbidden ones in the corner, and ultimately reaching for the simplest dish on the menu: "orsak," "eg tok feil," "kan eg prøve på nytt?" — sorry, I was wrong, can I try again?

Mara: Which turns out to taste like home.

Pip: The sleep poems in "søvn / ikkje søvn" — sleep / not sleep — return to the body under pressure. Five sections: insomnia, uncontrolled sleep, the besieged waking mind, a nocturnal journey, and finally a deliberate descent back into rest. The arc is from exhaustion as combat to sleep as something like trust.

Mara: "Snakk og tomlar" — Talk and Thumbs — brings the social media world into the same frame. Two poems: one a confessional note from a friend who hasn't kept up because Facebook ate his attention, the other a longer piece — credited to ChatGPT within the text — observing the city of scrollers, the bus of faces melted into glass, intelligence disappearing bit by bit.

Pip: The cure, the poem notes, waits unread outside the screen. Which is a reasonable place to leave it.

Mara: "eit forsvar for identitet" — a defense of identity — is the collection's most psychologically intricate piece. A speaker examines his own pattern of desire: drawn not to men but to their unsayable wounds, to locked rooms, to resistance that sharpens longing. The poem is a sustained, unflinching self-examination — naming the control, the architecture of other people's feelings, the way taming kills desire.

Pip: And it arrives at what it calls the cruel arithmetic: the truly broken don't perform their brokenness on cue, the truly guarded don't soften for strangers, and the truly distant stay distant.

Mara: "etter kvart som åra gjekk" — as the years went — is a compressed autobiography in verse: from romanticized teenage lies, through hippie summers, disco nights in New York and London, multilingual poetry, AIDS activism, marriages and divorces that masked ongoing violence, to the present, where poetry has become identity itself. It ends simply: "Eg lever." I live.

Pip: "RYTMAR OG TÅRER" gathers shorter lyric poems — grief at a graveside in "KVITE ROSER," the gallows-bar scene of "LE GIBET," the tightrope walk of "TOVEBRO," the neon performance of "GLANS," and the wine-stain memory of "UNDER HUDEN." Together they read like a lyric archive of accumulated experience.

Mara: "PUTESNAKK" — Pillow Talk — closes the collection as a collaborative poem with J.L. Skirvin, a dialogue between two voices in the same bed, moving between dream and waking, car crash and lavendar sheets, Kant and snoring. The accompanying essay reads it through existentialism and Jungian psychology — the broken mirror as ego, the sleepwalking as a protest against meaningless reality.

Pip: And then, at the very end, a short poem about a boy from the city who dreams of traveling to a village in Wales with a name so long it winds like wind over rooftops — Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch — just to stand at a foreign post office and admit, finally, that this is one word he cannot say.

Mara: Which is its own kind of surrender — and a fitting place to land.

—

Pip: What stays with me is the cane as a third leg, the cage with Wi-Fi, and the word buffet where the cheapest dish tastes most like home.

Mara: Bodies, cities, language, and the stubborn refusal to disappear — there's more of that territory ahead. See you next time.