From Katie's prompt: "Write a poem which includes the line 'ashtrays go astray.'"

ashtrays go astray
a gutted cell phone splays
cigarette butts and grey dust
over books whose pages
yellow like bruises
of atrophied memory

beer bottles crowd the table
like gravestones
commemorating cathexis
of long-dead nights
and the fan wheezes
weakly through nicotene
clouds of conversation

we swat away, lazily,
like the hum of flies
trailing from the open fridge
whose half-light casts shadows
where none were before.

when we remember
to check the VCR's clock
we'll groan at those ghostly
green digits-- 1:17
and collapse in alcoholic heaps

entwined on twin beds
rubbing thin beads
of sweat between our bodies
until finally the warm
darkness tugs us to sleep.

the rearview mirror
suspends my spectral
face over receding tree lines,
bifurcates metallic siding

headlights wink above grinning grills
and we freight forwards
for fear, for beauty
for maximum efficiency

the dash becomes my ottomon
and my shoed feet
obscure the flicks of white paint
passing with the seconds
piled like roadside rubble,
the rawest mountain of the landscape

its heaps of grey
unshared moments separate
us like the snake of a line
between one black dot,
me, to one black dot,
you, superimposed over
the sad pastels of
amateur cartography

bridge ices before road
and the speed is limited
to 55,
the sun licks my ankles
and the engine sings me to sleep

I will wake up in the
sepia dim of a tunnel
that slices through a countryside
I didn't miss,
and didn't miss me.