Elizabeth Sheline '22

Spring 2020

n’somnia and peepholes

 

what kind of schedule do you keep

 

a regular one

i say

as the clock reads 3

 

around 4

i surrender to everybody’s everything

an alluring documentary

on the late emo-trap star 

lil peep

 

i’m confused

yet absorbed

frightened

yet reminded

of music on myspace

brokencyde

and other crunkore, sad, pathetic wigger kids

who can’t scream for shit 

thank you

icedevil

—a fellow n’somniac

lurking in the eerie hollows of online band forums—

for putting into words something i can’t

 

but i don’t wholly agree with icedevil

they appears to have no time

for pathetic wigger kids and their screamo-rap game

while i

on the other hand 

have plenty of time

 

the film ends

and i grasp for words and 

wiggle down wormholes

that expand into rabbit holes

and search for a vocabulary

that doesn’t exist

 

to explain this enigma

this tormented boy

covered in ink

in a way that is

at first

alarming

unsettling

yet free from inhibitions

meaning

or fucks 

for anyone who doesn’t understand

what it means to be a sadboi

 

i search for words

to defend my obsession with songs

that aren’t puzzles

but rave anthems and 

gen-z spirituals

that bleed mcr and fob but 

without the depth or intellect 

we expect from broken artists

who beg the world to untangle their words

in hopes that they'll someday be fixed

 

but when you are as numb as gus

whose days are numbered

predestined in a sense

for another world

a different world

there’s no time for

breadcrumbs or

untangling or 

anything really

but two minute songs

about xan and

girls and

how hard it is to be sad

songs that are no works of genius

but necessary 

 

and essential

like the revolutionary

and pack ’ack

who could have been a boomer

and wrinkled his nose

at gus and his ink

and his ascent

to sadboi stardom 

international acclaim

with molly in baggies

and ragers on buses

but he took up his pen

to tell peep that he loved him

​

and that

is the saddest part

of it all

 

to be broken

loved

and

gone

​

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