We’re on the balcony

drinking beer the first day of fall

so it’s hard not to notice the next place

behind mine only 15 feet away,

and their roof is 3 feet lower than mine,

then there’s another building maybe

the same distance after that

and so on so with one

good Batarang you

can travel the whole block easy.

So I am moved to tell

my friends I must become

the Fatass Batman and be a positive influence,

so about once a week the evildoers will be cowed

and the beautiful women and

earnest children will say "Thank you,

Fatass Batman" and wonder who I really am.

And the Chinese Seafood place

is well within my range of operations,

and the woman from the floor

below who moved out, I tell my friends,

she was in the elevator with us once,

will move back in specifically so she can

become a journalist about me without

knowing it’s me and one time

I go rescue a child but it’s me

as a little kid, the most earnest child

of them all, with my black plastic glasses

melted together with a kitchen match

where they broke and I’ll say to the little

starstruck me: Stay the course, little fella.

Someday you too may become a Fatass Batman

and I’ll be right, I say to my friends.

My friends think I am so fucking stupid

they feel compelled to argue against

my becoming the Fatass Batman,

citing the danger, e.g. high voltage

lines three feet beyond the balcony

in fact my friend the algebra teacher says

there’s no way you could possibly miss those things

if you tried doing that from there and I say yeah

but it wouldn’t hurt I wouldn’t be grounded right?

and start thinking aloud about what else

should go in my belt and they’re saying Don’t

keep thinking about this Randy please and somebody

take those Viking mushrooms away from him

when he’s talking like this and I say, since you said please,

if I don’t do it would you thank me? And they say

yes and turn on the Christian rock station

through their weeping and I say,

would you say Thank you, Fatass Batman,

not only now but whenever you thank me