The boarding pass must not be lost,
and suddenly it's worthless.
Vital to purchasing is the one time code
until the moment passes.
You must retain this row of bars,
then might as well delete it.
Artefacts vital to conducting life
change state, flash forward to fleeting.
So is it possible those precious things
we cling to passionately: wedding rings
a dead friend's scarf, the chain
painfully bought in Palestine -
are surplus to felicity, if seen
from a sufficient distance?
Our tourist-brochure rustic dream
now wreck-reduced subsistence
shrugs off nostalgia, struggles vast
rubble, restoring stone by stone, faces hard
a future rooted in a sloughed-off past,
new morphing into ancient. To live is to discard.