Few instructions are harder to obey than "forget." The moment someone says it, the thing is lodged more firmly in your head than before. Jason Ridpath builds a six-line poem on that paradox and never resolves it. His speaker keeps giving the order, keeps naming the very things that are supposed to vanish, and finally drops the order altogether in favour of a plea.
The poem opens with "Forget red," a stanza of two words, and it is the strangest item on the list. The other objects, "the reprise," "the patterns," "the test," belong to the language of study and examination. Red has no obvious place among them, and the poem never explains it, so any reading is an inference. But the isolation matters. Red is the colour of warnings, stop signs and corrections in a margin, and it is hard not to see. With no article and no explanation, it feels like a colour that has seeped into everything, and it gets a stanza to itself as if it were the heaviest thing to put down.
The list that follows sketches a mind going round the same track. A reprise is a return, a musical phrase coming back, and the word quietly describes the poem's own habit, since "Forget" begins nearly every line. "Patterns" suggests things the brain has been drilled to spot and repeat, and "the test" is the reason for all the drilling. The poem never names a classroom or an exam hall, but its vocabulary points that way, and a student could easily read it as a midnight-revision poem.
Ridpath uses no rhyme and no fixed metre, yet the poem has a strong beat. "Forget" is an iamb, for-GET, so "Forget the patterns" and "Forget the test" fall into the same steady rhythm, a stress on the verb and another on the noun. It sounds like a chant, or like something learned by rote, which is a clever irony for a poem about letting go of rote learning. There is a gentler sound pattern too. The short *e* of "forget," "red" and "test" runs through the poem and ties the first and last objects together, so the sound repeats just as the words do.
The rhythm breaks at "Your brain is tired." This is the only line without the verb "forget," and it changes the poem's whole footing. Until now we have been given orders. Here we are given a reason. The words are plain and almost entirely one syllable, and the stresses fall heavily (YOUR BRAIN is TIRED), like a door closing on the argument. The tone is hard to pin down. It could be a kind teacher or a doctor, or it could be the reader's own voice talking to itself. Because "your" speaks directly to us, we cannot stay outside the poem as observers.
One small detail deserves attention. "Forget the patterns" is the only line with no full stop. It could be a slip, but it works as a deliberate effect, because the sentence trails off unfinished, as if attention were already slipping. Whether or not Ridpath intended it, the missing punctuation makes the page look a little tired too.
The ending is the poem's best move. "Please forget" adds a word of politeness, and the command becomes a request. It also loses its object. Every earlier "forget" had something to hold on to (red, the reprise, the test), but now the verb stands alone, and there is nothing left to name because the instruction has widened to cover everything. The poem forgets its own list in the act of finishing it.
The poem's significance lies in this compression. In six short lines it turns an impossible command into something closer to mercy, and it ends by granting permission to stop rather than demanding success. Anyone who has stared at a page long after the words stopped meaning anything will recognise the voice. And because the poem is so short, it has the odd distinction of being very hard to forget.