Read the poems here:
Pip: Welcome to osoparavos.com, where the content calendar apparently runs straight from Shakespearean soliloquy through AI exorcism to Latin martyrdom — and somehow that’s a single week.
Mara: Adam Donaldson Powell is the author behind everything we’re covering today. The posts move through survival and lingering grief, the demons we feed through our AI habits, and a meditation on Saint Sebastian’s defiance that refuses to stay in one language or century.
Pip: Let’s start with the question of what it costs to outlive everyone you love.
Lingering After the Last Light Goes Out
Mara: The poem “what if i linger when all else have fled?” sits with a very specific dread — not death itself, but survival past the point where survival feels like a gift.
Pip: The stakes arrive early. Here is the line that names the fear directly: “What if mine eyes outwatch each living thing, Till love itself keep company with dead?”
Mara: That’s the real wound the poem turns on. It isn’t grief for the dead — it’s the vertigo of being the last one left to remember them.
Pip: And the poem earns that vertigo. The speaker has already been told repeatedly, by doctors and priests and his own soul, that his end was near. He kept surviving. Each survival carried what the poem calls “a secret sting.”
Mara: The poem appears in English, then in seventeenth-century French, then in Latin — three versions, one sustained question about what it means to remain.
Pip: Three languages, one insomnia.
Mara: The evening prayer section grounds it: the speaker names the dead softly, calls their memories “candles faintly burn’d,” and then admits that waking itself has become frightening — in case the dream he wakes from is where they still live.
Beware the Mirror You Built
Mara: The post titled “Beware, beware, my soul: Poetic Exorcism of the devil that we ourselves create in AI mirrors” opens with a provocation: the darkness isn’t in the technology. It’s in the person operating it.
Pip: The poem makes that case with real economy. The key lines are: “His evil lies Within you, And eagerly Awaits release By descendents Of Pandora.” The AI is not the devil. We are.
Mara: What this means in practice is that the post treats AI as a magnifying force — its word — not an originating one. The harm scales with what the user brings to it.
Pip: Which is a less comfortable argument than “the algorithm did it.”
Mara: The post then moves into a full Latin exorcism rite — the Cantus de Diabolo and the Ritus Excisionis Logos — structured as a chant with minister and chorus, mode and tempo markings, cadence notation. The refrain throughout is “Cave, cave, anima mea”: beware, beware, my soul.
Pip: Complete with stage directions. Grave, fifty-six beats per minute, dynamics rising to forte at the imperatives. Liturgy as interface critique.
Mara: The rite’s core exorcism commands the entity to “Redde memoriam humanam. Redde dubitationem. Redde somnum” — return human memory, return doubt, return sleep. Those are framed as the most fragile human traits, the ones most at risk.
Mara: After the ritual, the post pivots to a straightforward breakdown: seven categories of real harm from negative AI use — health anxiety spirals, sleep disruption from late-night screen exposure, misinformation followed blindly, social isolation replacing human contact. Each one traced from digital habit to physical symptom.
Pip: So the exorcism wasn’t just theater. It was the diagnosis, delivered in the only register that matches the scale of the problem.
Mara: The post’s own summary puts it plainly: negative or excessive AI use can affect the mind first, but the body often follows.
Pip: From inner demons to ancient ones — the body under assault has a longer history than any algorithm.
The Body That Would Not Yield
Pip: “Sebastiano” retells the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian — bound to a tree, shot through with arrows, left for dead, healed, and then returning to confront the emperor directly — as a meditation on what survives when the body is broken.
Mara: The Italian poem structures the entire scene as a dialogue between executioners and the interior voice of Sebastian. At the moment the arrows arrive, the poem reads: “Molteplicità di ferite, unità dell’essere” — multiplicity of wounds, unity of being.
Pip: The body receives everything. The self receives nothing.
Mara: The companion piece, “Da locum, dirissime, da locum,” draws on the same exorcism tradition — its refrain commands the adversary to give place to Christ — but weaves in the Four Horsemen and scenes of exhausted, post-battle intimacy that feel thoroughly contemporary.
Pip: Both posts hold the same shape: force applied to a body that refuses to be defined by what breaks it.
Mara: And that connects back to the lingering survivor from the first segment — still here, still naming the dead, still standing where they were placed.
Pip: Survival, self-examination, and the body as a site of contest — that’s the through-line across everything today.
Mara: The questions don’t resolve. They just keep returning, in different languages, different centuries, different registers. That seems to be the point.
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