‘Shtum’ (sometimes spelled ‘shtoom’) is a Yiddish word meaning silent or dumb. The sibilance in this line (stays, shtum, sin) makes ya wanna go “SSSSHHHHHHH!!!”

To ‘have your fingers in a pie’ is to have a vested interest in something, or to be involved in something (usually with a meddling edge). Here it’s got an extra nasty sexual connotation brought out by the word “feeling”: ‘pie’ can also be slang for a vagina.

What is it that’s so ominous about little red books? It might have something to do with the most famous ‘little red book’ of all:

A lot of poets have flirted with communism – among them Pablo Neruda and Percy Bysshe Shelley – and even more poets have little books in which they note down ideas for their poems. I tend to do it in the ‘Notes’ app on my phone.

i.e. By which.

As the next line makes clear, this is a similar sort of bar to the one Eminem was raising. In this case, though, I’m not raising my standards but having them stolen from me by the poem’s addressee, who’s removing the only way I have of understanding myself.

The two slashes on either side of the ‘bar’ are a holla back to the phrase’s origin:

It’s also a reference to Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar”, a poem which compares death to going out in a ship. There, again, the ‘bar’ is seen as a measuring device. I can’t even tell the difference between life and death any more.

In the original, this is highlighted in black. Black Star is a seminal rap duo from the late nineties; a dark star, on the other hand, is a star heavy enough that light can’t escape from its gravitational field. Much of this poem is about the speaker’s feeling of inferiority, so that relative to me the poem’s addressee is huge enough to be a dark star (and, now that I’m out of her/his orbit, inaccessible enough too).

i.e.: Only.

A star. In the original it’s lowered slightly, so it’s at the same level as the rest of the line. That way it can’t be confused with an asterisk.

In the original, the letters “rbit” are raised slightly – placing emphasis on the ‘O’, which is a big ‘O’ like the circle of an orbit.