Dreams never last. Those three words open Jason Ridpath's poem and also hand down its verdict, and everything after reads as either an appeal against that sentence or an acceptance of it. The poem is only a handful of fragments, yet it holds a whole attitude toward time: imagination, memory and ordinary afternoons are all moving the same way, and the open question is how to stand in their path.
The title is slippery. "Dreams" might mean what we see asleep or what we hope for, and the poem lets both sit side by side. "Visions of future. / Visions of past." could describe hopes and memories, dreams that face forward and backward. The missing articles ("of future," not "of the future") make the lines feel clipped, like notes jotted down quickly. The mirrored phrasing also makes future and past almost interchangeable, and neither is more solid than the other. "Alternate timelines" pushes the idea further. The phrase sounds borrowed from science fiction, and it suggests lives we didn't live, or might still live, so that even imagined versions of events are slipping away.
Then the poem turns from the abstract to the human: "The reverb of your last laugh." Until this line there is no person in the poem, and suddenly there is a "you." We aren't told whose laugh it is or why it was the last. Judging by the imagery, a loss of some kind is likely, but the text leaves the reader to fill that in. "Reverb" is a studio word for an echo that outlives its source, and the line has a quiet pun in it. "Last" means both "final" and "endure," and the poem keeps pulling those meanings apart. The last laugh is last in time, yet it doesn't last. "Resonating between the cracks" suggests where the sound survives, in the gaps of memory, or between one timeline and the next. Resonance is a gentle kind of persistence, which sits oddly beside the poem's insistence that nothing persists.
The sound of the poem works the same way. There is no regular meter and no tidy rhyme scheme, but one sound keeps coming back: *last*, *past*, *last*, *pass*, *last*. The poem has its own reverb. Nearly every line ends with a full stop, so it moves in small, separate beats, each one finishing before the next begins, like the moments it describes.
The one real break in that pattern is the longest sentence: "Moments need to be seized and moments / should be allowed to pass." The line breaks on the repeated word "moments," and the sentence spills over, as if it can't be contained. It is also the poem's only advice, and it contradicts itself. Seize them, but also let them go. The poem never says which moments belong in which category, and "need" and "should" make both demands feel like duties. The word "pass" falls at the very end of the line, so the line lets go of it as it speaks.
The ending turns flat on purpose. "Moments are moments, they will never last" is a tautology joined by a comma splice, and it sounds like a shrug. It returns to the first line's "never last," so the poem closes where it began. The final fragment, "Good, neutral or bad," adds something more interesting. Poems about time usually chase the golden moments, but this one gives equal weight to the dull middle. The list also slides downward and ends on "bad." The comfort it offers is cold, since bad moments won't last, but neither will good ones, and the poem refuses to say which fact should matter more.
The poem isn't significant for its polish. Its plainness is part of its character, and a few lines lean on bare statement. What makes it worth reading is that it won't settle. Some poems urge us to seize the day and others mourn what is gone, and this one does both, then folds both into one larger fact. It also shows how much a poem can do with very little: short lines, a repeated sound, a single word carrying two meanings. The poem is itself a small echo of a moment, caught for as long as it takes to read.