Vaughan's poem starts as a wish list and ends as a verdict. Its speaker opens with a run of "if I could" fantasies, then turns on the "you" being addressed: whatever grand plans that person once had, they have shrunk into a "face in the crowd." The central idea is how ambition curdles into rivalry. The poem asks whether wanting to be "in charge of the world" is really about the world at all, or about winning in front of one particular person.
The double title, split by a slash, announces two halves, and the poem obeys. The first is built on repetition: "If I could be anything," "If I could do anything," "if I were in charge." Each opening promises more power than the last. The list also changes direction as it goes. The speaker would do "the things you said could not be done," go where "you have never been," see what "you have never seen." Then, in a quiet widening, the speaker would say "the things that no one's said before." Rivalry slides into a bid for originality. The poem never says who "you" is. "That special someone you can never have" hints at a romantic edge, but the same sentence wants to be "the thing that eats you up inside," so the relationship could just as easily be a former friend or a rival. Leaving it blank lets readers supply their own.
The hinge comes in the plainest line: "I guess you wouldn't be." The offhand "I guess" is what makes it cold. The speaker doesn't announce a victory, just shrugs the other person out of existence. Then "You'd just be a" breaks off mid-phrase, and the line break drops the reader straight into "Face in the crowd."
That refrain returns three times, and between appearances the poem piles up adjectives: "unremarkable / Unrecognizable / Indistinguishable." There is no end rhyme here, since the poem is free verse, but the shared *-able* endings work like a drumbeat, each word longer and heavier than the last. Then the pattern snaps. "Devoid of uniqueness" is flat and abstract, like a phrase from a form, which fits the speaker's attempt to reduce a person to a category. The poem then turns concrete with "the nosebleeds," slang for the cheapest seats in an arena. Judging by this setting, the speaker imagines standing on the stage or field, though the poem never says so. The short lines, "Waving your arms / Trying to be seen / Screaming as loud / As you possibly can," chop the effort into gasps, and the stacked *-ing* verbs never settle into a finished action. The shouting goes on without result. "But it's no use" is delivered almost kindly, which makes it sting more.
The final three lines are long and level after all that clipping: "While I remember the days when you / Told everyone that would listen / That you'd be in charge of the world." They sound like someone recounting the story calmly. They also repeat the phrase "in charge of the world," the very ambition the speaker claimed a few lines earlier. The two figures turn out to be mirror images. Both want the world, and both want to be heard. The "you" in the nosebleeds is shown screaming to be noticed, but the speaker is shouting too, in the form of an entire poem aimed at one person. There is a contradiction as well. Someone truly "unrecognizable" would not be remembered so precisely, down to what they told "everyone that would listen." The memory gives away how much that person still matters.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. On the surface it is a boast and a put-down. Underneath, it exposes the insecurity that boasting hides. Every one of the speaker's achievements is conditional: "I'd," "I'd," "I'd," never "I did." The confidence is imagined, and the contempt is a way of staying tied to the person it dismisses. A plain, spoken voice and one repeated phrase are enough for the speaker to undercut themselves, and the poem captures a familiar feeling: defining yourself against someone who once doubted you, or whom you once admired.