Nobody in this poem gets a name. The man the speaker envies is only "that guy," a figure assembled from compliments, a crown, a mansion and a body "to die for." By the end the speaker has taken the opposite label: "I'm just nobody." Gabe's «Envy» is built on that exchange. The more the speaker piles onto the imagined rival, the less is left of the person doing the looking.
The structure is a refrain. Four of the six stanzas open with the same line, "I wanna be that guy," and each time a new quality follows: charm, looks, popularity, wealth. The casual "wanna" makes the repetition sound like a thought muttered over and over, not a polished confession. The rival is a collage, not a person, and that suits envy, which rarely looks at the whole of someone's life, only at the shiny parts. The speaker even admires "his huge ego." Envy here wants everything, including the flaws.
The imagery is small and idiomatic. "The crown he wears" makes the rival a monarch ruling over admiration. "A body to die for" is an everyday phrase, but in a poem about a corrosive emotion it carries a darker echo. "Ideal, they say" is easy to skip past, yet it matters: the standard of perfection is secondhand, handed down by an unnamed "they." Straight after it comes the speaker's only direct question, "Who am I anyway?" It rhymes with "they say," as if the judgment of others and the speaker's self-doubt were one thought. The rhyme is quiet but pointed.
Rhyme is otherwise occasional, and the poem is free verse in short, plain lines. "There" and "everywhere" chime in the third stanza, and "away" there echoes "anyway" from the stanza before. These echoes feel unplanned, like a mind circling back to the same worry. The grammar is loose too. "Being chased here and there / Took their breath away" slips from present into past, so the lines read as speech more than as careful writing. The looseness works because the speaker is not composing a argument, only thinking aloud.
The fifth stanza is where the pattern breaks. The refrain disappears, and "be" gives way to "want": "I want that body, that face / I want everything he has." The wish to become someone has turned into a wish to own his parts, "from head to toe," almost like shopping. Then comes the hinge word, "But," and the deflating "just nobody." The rival was never named, but at least he was "that guy." The speaker has no label at all.
The last stanza is a lines shorter than the others, as though the poem runs out of room. It also steps back from "I" to "we." "Envy equals insecurities" sounds like a definition from a textbook, with the equals sign flattening feeling into a formula. "This toxic" turns an adjective into a noun, so envy becomes a substance that has got into the system, and "can never be undone" is blunt and fatalistic. The final couplet is the most thoughtful moment: "It's hard to change a perception / If we can't change ourselves." The word "perception" suggests that the problem lies in how the speaker sees, both the rival and themselves, since "ideal" was only ever what "they say." But the poem stops at the "if" and offers no cure. Readers can take that as bleak or as a quiet nudge to look inward.
What makes «Envy» worth reading is its honesty and its economy. It does not blame the envied person, and it does not dress the feeling up as ambition. It shows envy as a habit of thought: a list that keeps growing while the self keeps shrinking. Its plain words and repeated line are easy to relate to, because most readers have caught themselves running a list like this one. The moral at the end is rough, but it sounds like someone who has just worked the idea out and is saying it before it slips away.