Romance As Tragedy Poem by David Welch

I saw a talk-show interview
of a new author, all the rage,
she had sold two million copies,
her book is everywhere these days.

It was tailor-made for women,
a downcast wife looking for love,
verbally abusive husband,
trapped in a situation tough.

Until one day she went out west,
going on vacation alone,
her husband said that he had work,
brushed her off, she was on her own.

She had gone out to a dude ranch,
she had loved horses as a kid,
where she met the ranch's wrangler,
a mountain man cowboy named Sid.

He was what her husband was not,
Sid was caring, confident, cool,
he'd help he mouth, his touch would linger,
and she'd smile back like a fool.

They'd find themselves talking for hours,
finding any excuse to touch,
then one day in a mountain meadow
they spread a blanket and made love.

It was all that she lacked at home,
passionate, intense, and sincere,
she wished that she could never leave,
but she had a life, a career….

And her cowboy love made peanuts,
not enough for two to survive,
nesides, this was infatuation,
that's what she told herself inside.

But at home she couldn't be happy,
soon enough she longer for escape,
so once a year, for a whole week,
to her cowboy she'd make her way.

And this continued for eight years,
until she saw on their website,
that her man died in a car crash,
she hid her tears for that whole night.

Yet he had left a parting gift,
for she was sick in the mornings,
this was the author's tragic tale,
it has countless fans adoring.

To seal the deal she did proclaim
that it was based on her own life,
she'd changed names, but much was quite real,
you sold more with tales of real strife.

My own wife was enrapt by it,
which caused me some little alarm,
but she just laughed and dismissed it
when I said such tales could do harm.

But something just didn't sit right,
on the whole thing something seemed off,
I know truth is stranger than fiction,
but something kept making me scoff.

Real life just doesn't work this way,
romance can never be that clear,
then throw in infidelity?
This tale was not what it appeared.

So in free time I went online,
digging into the author's past,
and saw that I was not the first
to put this new writer on blast.

First off it seemed that her husband
had no been an abusive man,
just a nebbish actually,
it was clear she had worn the pants.

She'd married him for security,
and his needs she'd most ignored,
she hadn't strayed to seek out love,
she'd cheated because she was bored!

Deep down she'd craved the bad-boy type,
the kind she has slept with in school,
and that cowboy had scratched the itch,
but things would get even more cruel…

See her cowboy, he was married,
with a wife and two children fine,
but the author wasn't bothered,
in fact she knew this the whole time!

She was fine with wrecking a home,
so long as she could see to her wants,
the only thing she didn't know
was that he took other girls on jaunts.

And worse still there was that business
of him giving her a ‘parting gift, '
it turns out that he gave her three,
Her poor husband never knew it!

It only ever was found out
when the daughter who was oldest
wanted to research her family,
took an ancestry DNA test.

The results that she found shock her,
shocked the family to the core,
none of the kids were the husband's,
he now was a father no more.

And even thought the kids all said
that the husband was still their dad,
he couldn't make sense of it all,
and things got very, very bad.

She'd taken his whole life from him,
his understanding of all things,
all those decades of sacrifice,
and what, in the end, did it bring?

The thought that it was null and void
was just too much for this poor man,
he went out and bought a pistol,
ending his life by his own hands.

His no-longer children found him,
it was a trauma none should bear,
they no longer speak to their mother,
need therapists to fight despair.

All this was brought out to the news,
but it mattered little to them,
didn't fit with their narratives,
society cares not for men.

And did the author feel awful?
Did any of this cause regret?
No, she wrote her romantic book,
made her millions off of the dead.

The best authors are narcissists,
not one of them think they're malign,
Hollywood wants to make a film,
I think she'll fit in with them fine.

But I can't just ignore all this,
and when I see love tales with cheating,
I remember that husband's death,
then I feel my anger rising…