Eight short lines, no title (just three asterisks), and a question that most of us never think to ask: whose body is this? Elijah's poem starts there and moves quickly from philosophy to something more personal. The speaker wonders whether the body is "controlled by someone" else, then narrows the question to a specific complaint: being "a girl with boobs" when they might have been "a boy with a flat chest." The central idea is a painful gap between a person and the body they have been given, and a longing to be on the other side of it.
The image that holds the poem together is the passenger seat. It's a small, ordinary picture, and it works well. A passenger moves at speed, sees everything, and has no hands on the wheel. Applied to a body, it captures a feeling of watching your own life go past while someone or something else steers. The grammar helps. "Or is it controlled by someone / and im in the passenger seat" runs on without a break, so the thought arrives as one rush instead of a tidy, finished idea. The "someone" is never named. It could be nature, biology, other people's expectations, or something the speaker can't put a word to. Leaving that blank makes the unease feel larger.
The poem's form is plain, and that is part of its force. There is no rhyme and no regular rhythm, only short lines that sound like thinking out loud. The lowercase "i," the missing apostrophe in "im," the casual "cause" and the absence of a question mark after the opening line all give the writing the texture of a private note or a late-night message. Nothing is polished, and that is the point. A neat stanza would suggest a problem already understood and tamed, and the speaker is plainly not there yet. The one question that ends with "why" ("cause why was i made like this") is even tangled in with the lowercase rush of the sentence before it.
Look closely at that word "made." It is passive, and it implies a maker, so the speaker is not someone who grew into this body but someone who was assembled into it. Responsibility sits elsewhere, which fits the passenger image and adds a note of accusation. The question is half genuine puzzlement and half complaint.
The next two lines are the most carefully balanced in the poem. "A girl with boobs / not a boy with a flat chest" is built as an antithesis, with the same structure repeated on both sides: article, noun, "with," body part. The word "with" is revealing, because it treats the body as something attached to a person. And the body is reduced to one feature. "Boobs" is a blunt, slightly childish word, not a clinical or poetic one, and it sounds like how a teenager might speak of something they would rather not discuss. "Flat chest" is a smooth, empty phrase that makes the alternative sound like relief. Whole identities, "girl" and "boy," hang on that single physical difference, and the speaker seems to resent how much weight it carries.
The ending slows the pace. "I envy them," is the only line with any punctuation, and the comma makes a pause. Then comes "all of them," which stretches the feeling from a few individuals to a whole group. The envy is general, and it sounds tired. "Them" also places the speaker outside, looking in at boys as a crowd they cannot join. The poem doesn't resolve anything. It also never says outright who the speaker is. It stays with the envy and the sense of mismatch, without offering a label or a conclusion, so the reader can't turn it into a neat case study.
That refusal is much of what makes the poem worth reading. In so few words it asks a real question about bodily autonomy, finds a precise image for alienation, and trusts plain speech to carry the feeling. It sounds like a real voice instead of a performance, and a reader who has ever felt out of step with their own body, for whatever reason, will recognise the passenger seat.