Late at night, when the mind has nothing to do but wander, even harmless thoughts can turn on you. LenaTerhaar's "I've Lost Control", dated 03.12.17, begins there: "I start to wonder about unnecessary things in the dark." Calling these thoughts "unnecessary" looks like an attempt to shrink them before they can do damage. The next line gives the game away: "The later it gets, the worse it becomes." The poem is about a mind that splits into a bright side and a gloomy side, and about the moment when the speaker can no longer choose which side to stand on.
The central image is a room cut into two halves. One is "nice", with "good memories and a clean mind". The other is "dark and messy", "oppressively drab and grey". The vocabulary of tidiness is revealing. Describing a mood as clean or messy treats it like housekeeping, and the judgment seems to land on the speaker. Judging by the wording, the dark half feels like a failure of upkeep as well as a bad feeling. The imbalance is also visible on the page. The good half gets one fragment, "Plants and plans." The bad half gets longer lines and a heavy adverb. "Oppressively" is itself a long, weighty word that drags the sentence down.
"Plants and plans" is the poem's only moment of musical neatness. The repeated pl- sound and the near-identical words make it feel tidy, small and growing, which suits the good half. Otherwise there is no rhyme and no regular rhythm. The lines run from a short fragment to long, prose-like sentences, so the poem reads like thinking aloud, or a diary entry written in the dark. Small irregularities, such as "halfes" and the lowercase "i" in "who i am", add to the sense of something unedited and written in the moment. That is my inference from the text, but it fits the subject. A poem about losing control would sound odd if it were too polished.
That phrase, "who i am", sits in quotation marks. The speaker says it "depends on" which half they are, not which half they are in. The self is not a person visiting two rooms but something that changes with the room. The quotation marks seem to hold the idea at a distance, as if the speaker doubts that "who I am" is a stable thing at all.
The poem's logic builds toward its last lines. "I have legs, I can go from one half of the room to the other. / I have thoughts, I can switch from one mood to another." The parallel sentences sound calm, almost like a proof. If I can cross a floor, I should be able to cross my own moods. Then comes the poem's only stanza break and a single blunt line: "But I feel like I've lost control over that." The comparison was meant to reassure, and instead it exposes the gap. Legs obey, thoughts do not. Even here the speaker hedges with "I feel like" rather than "I have lost". The pronoun "that" is also vague. It could mean the switching, the splitting, or the whole business of being oneself, and the poem never says.
Two small details support this feeling of passivity. "I start to wonder" and "I start to part my room" use the same verb, so both the worrying and the dividing seem to begin on their own, as if they happen to the speaker. The title then gives away the ending before the poem has begun, which makes the text read less as a surprise than as an account of how the speaker got there.
The poem matters because of its plainness. It uses no dramatic vocabulary and names no diagnosis. It relies on a room, a floor, a pair of legs and the dark, things any reader knows, and that makes the experience easy to recognise. It also does not offer a comforting ending. It stops at the admission and leaves it standing alone, which is perhaps the most honest thing it could do.