the woman who read romance novels with happy endings

there’s an old episode
of Murder, She Wrote
about a woman
who by her own admission
reads only romance novels
with happy endings

but is beaten to death
by the bookseller
because she won’t leave
her violent husband
for him.

and I think how the show
is called “cosy”
with its light mystery
about which we know
that Lansbury
knows all,
or will.

sometimes I think of that lonely woman
who read kissing books to feel safe and as if
love lived somewhere beyond
the rotary and plastic frond
a dull domestic life.

and instead of that her life was cut short
by someone else who saw her just
as what he’d like to claim…

his last self-justifying whine:
‘she should have loved me,

I loved her so much’