Most poems about losing control long to get it back. RunaMarie's «Control» begins that way, then turns the wish inside out in its last two lines. The opening verdict is flat: "Never in control. / That's how my life was." The poem ends with a plea not to have the very thing that first line said was missing. The whole text is built to deliver that swerve.
The first half is a catalogue of helplessness. Control is absent over "friends. / Family. / Actions." Each word gets its own line, so they read like items being ticked off, moving from other people to the speaker's own behaviour. Then the "voices" arrive, "taking over, guiding me." The poem never says what they are. They might be an inner critic, a chorus of other people's expectations, or something closer to hearing voices in a clinical sense. Nothing in the text settles it, and that vagueness keeps all those readings open. The feeling, though, is precise: "Like a sickening puppet on strings." "Sickening" is an unusual choice. It suggests the speaker is nauseated by being moved, so there is a conscious self watching the strings pull.
The next three lines work like a drumbeat: "I danced for them. / I loved for them. / I cared for them." The grammar is identical each time, and the verbs soften as they go. Dancing is a physical act, while loving and caring are feelings. Control seems to travel inward, from the body to the heart. "For them" is the crucial phrase, because even affection is done on someone else's behalf. The rhythm is as obedient as the behaviour it describes.
Then the poem turns: "But now, we get along. / After so many years." This is the first "we," and it puts the speaker and the voices in one pronoun. It could be a truce, but "after so many years" sounds worn out rather than triumphant, like peace reached through exhaustion. The pace relaxes here, which is exactly when the poem undercuts it: "Only to hear the words. / That make my life come tumbling down." The full stop after "words" cuts through a sentence that grammar wants to keep whole. The reader hangs in that gap, waiting to learn what was said. "Tumbling down" also echoes the puppet. When the strings go slack, a puppet collapses.
What the "words" are is left to the reader. "Help me. / Please." could be the voices, so long in charge, now begging. It could also be the speaker's own cry. I find the first reading richer, because it explains the last two lines: "I don't want this, / I don't want to be in control." If the ones who once held the strings now ask to be held, then control means responsibility. The speaker would have to become the one who carries someone else.
Those final lines have their own texture. Every other sentence in the poem is clipped by a full stop, even mid-thought, but here a comma lets the speech run on and the urgency spill over. "I don't want" is also the first time the speaker's "I" takes a verb of will. Earlier it only danced, loved and cared. The first real act of choice is a refusal, and the refusal is of choice itself. That irony gives the poem its ache.
There is no rhyme and almost no ornament, just short lines, plain words, and one central simile. The title returns as the first and last idea, framing the poem like a loop that closes on a changed meaning. The poem's significance lies in challenging a comfortable assumption, that control is simply what a person should want. «Control» suggests that after years of being ruled, the harder thing may be to be handed the reins by the same forces that once owned you.