Tuesday, April 2, 2024

Vik Shirley : Sestina for Rock’s Ghost

 

 

 

Mabel didn’t have the energy to land the plane,
so she kept flying, or cruising, rather, while passengers
looked at each other with bemusement and slight annoyance
at her playing such terrible music over the tannoy,
as almost none of them liked the genre of soft rock
and literally none of them wanted to be Jon Bon Jovi.

However, unbeknownst to those onboard, until this fateful day, Jon Bon Jovi
did want to be one of them. Probably the person you’d least expect on the plane.
I mean if you were looking at them all with a Columbo-eye, Rock
Hudson would be the last choice. Not just because he’s dead, but as there were other passengers
who wore a permed mane like 80s Jon Bon, liked the sound of their own voice over the tannoy,
donned tight leather trousers and had a tasselled jacket flicking about, to everyone’s annoyance.

But it was Rock Hudson that Jon Bon Jovi wanted to be, the annoyance
and confusion when the truth came out was widespread. What surprising taste Jon Bon Jovi
harboured, and how had Rock Hudson come back from the dead, someone asked over the tannoy.
Then it became apparent that it was, of course, the ghost of Rock Hudson on the plane,
not Rock Hudson himself. Jon Bon had met the ghost, along with another of the passengers
at a little soirée in New Jersey, where celebrities and ghosts of celebrities go to rock.

Jon Bon had never met anyone like him. Boy that ghost knew how to rock!
Jon Bon prided himself on his drinking, but Rock’s ghost was better, to his annoyance.
And, wow, his dancing, had all the girls and girl-ghosts dancing to Iggy Pop’s ‘The Passenger’.
The soft-rock God had never seen such a thing. “Hey girls,” he said, “my name is Jon Bon Jovi.”
The girls didn’t care. By then Rock’s ghost was telling an anecdote about flying a plane.
They were laughing, gazing at him when “Call for Mr. Hudson’s ghost” came over the tannoy.

How did all this come out? What manifestation did it take years later over the plane tannoy?
For nearly a decade Jon Bon had been disguising himself and following the ghost of Rock.
In many ways he wished he hadn’t been there that night of his anecdote about the plane.
It was a hunch that told him to follow Rock to take the call. Annoyance
wasn’t the word for it. Red, then blue with more than a splash of green Jon Bon Jovi
turned, as he listened to the conversation. Rock called the girl on the phone Passengers.

This was the name Jon Bon’s girlfriend liked to be called! No one else was called Passengers.
It was too unusual. The ghost of Rock Hudson had won his girlfriend’s affections. From the tannoy
on the aircraft “shot through the heart and you’re to blame” from the song by Bon Jovi
made the ghost of Rock Hudson startle, ‘You give love a bad name.’ This soft rock
classic was no coincidence, he thought, and turned. On seeing Jon Bon, the annoyance
was subsumed by momentary fear. Jon had a gun and shot him, forgetting he was a ghost on a plane.

The aircraft went down and the passengers were killed as they hit the rocks.
Jon Bon sang ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ on the tannoy the whole way down, to everyone’s annoyance.
The ghost of Jon Bon Jovi emerged to see Rock’s ghost flying away in his private plane.

 

 

 

 

 

Vik Shirley is a poet, writer, educator, critic, and editor from Bristol, now living in Edinburgh. Her collection, The Continued Closure of the Blue Door (HVTN), her pamphlets, Corpses (Sublunary Editions), Grotesquerie for the Apocalypse (Beir Bua Press) and Poets (The Red Ceilings Press), and her book of photo-poetry Disrupted Blue and other poems on Polaroid (Hesterglock) were all published 2020-2022. Her most recent publications are Notes from the Underworld (Sublunary Editions), and Strangers Wave: Joy Division Photo Poems (zimZalla), which both came out in 2023. She has a PhD in Dark Humour and the Surreal in Poetry from the University of Birmingham.

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