Time travel in stories usually comes with machines, glowing dials and a sense of adventure. Jason Ridpath's "Loops in Time" strips all that away and keeps only the sensation: dizziness, collision, and no clear way out. The poem is about being stuck in repetition, moving "back and forth" without arriving anywhere. Its central idea is that a time loop is not a clever puzzle but a bruising, disorienting mess.
The first line sets the tone with an instruction: "Travel through the swirly mess." There is no "I" and no explanation, so the reader is simply pushed in. The word "swirly" is casual, almost childish, the sort of word you would use for a drawing or an ice-cream cone, and "mess" deflates any grandeur the idea of time travel might have. Time here is not a river or a grand machine. It is tangled.
The next lines tumble. "Upside down, right side up, another test" is a three-part list in which the second item undoes the first, so the line is a small loop in itself and ends up where it began. "Another test" is the quiet hinge. It suggests this has happened before and will happen again, like an exam you keep having to resit. Then comes "Back, slide, and flipped," where the grammar slips along with the body. "Back" is not really a verb here, "slide" is a bare command, and "flipped" is a past participle. The three words don't match, and that mismatch feels like losing your footing. Every word is a single beat, so the line moves fast.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter, which means length and shape do the work. Nothing prepares us for "Head smashed in." It is the shortest and harshest line, and it drops the article: not "my head" or "the head," just "Head," as if the body were being reported rather than owned. The passive phrasing leaves out whoever did the smashing. Violence with no agent could mean a literal injury, or it could be a figure for a mind overwhelmed by going round and round. The poem doesn't say, and its flatness is what chills, especially after the playful "swirly."
"Walls are falling, crumbling" is the only line in the present continuous. The collapse is happening now and never finishes, because it is "are falling," not "have fallen." The two near-synonyms also change the sound. "Falling" drops quickly, while "crumbling" is softer and slower, with its liquid *l* and *m* sounds, as if the wall is coming apart grain by grain. Walls usually mean shelter or boundaries. One possible reading, and it is an inference from the imagery, is that they stand for the dividers between one moment and the next. When they go, past and present spill into each other, which would explain why the loops happen at all.
The ending does the most structural work. "Loops in time" repeats the title, delivered like a diagnosis after the chaos. Then "Back and forth" closes with no full stop, at least in the version printed here. The poem does not end so much as hand us back to its start. "Back" also echoes "Back, slide, and flipped," and the natural next move is to return to "Travel through the swirly mess." The poem is built as the loop it describes. The one-line stanzas help. Each fragment sits isolated in white space, and those gaps read like blackouts between jolts, moments we cannot account for.
The poem comes with no date or note about why it was written, so everything has to be read from the page, and the page gives a lot. What makes it worth studying is the way form enacts meaning. A longer, smoother poem about confusion would only describe it. Ridpath's fragments, mismatched verbs and unpunctuated finish make us feel it. The clash of toy-like diction ("swirly," "flipped") with brutal imagery ("Head smashed in," "crumbling") keeps the reader off balance. The poem also stays open. It could be science fiction, a memory that won't settle, anxious thoughts that circle, or a bad day replaying. Some readers may find that vagueness frustrating, but it lets each reader's own sense of being stuck fill the gaps. The poem shows how repetition can be a poem's subject and its structure at once.