Staten Island Steve, I Salute

for Steve Zane

After the blast, when Manhattan flickered

like a burnt-out jukebox and gulls cried

through skeletons of ferries, I found

a cracked cassette marked Dream Smashes.

It hissed. It lived. It bled noise.

Steve’s voice came through the static—

arcane, coded, laughing at doom itself.

He spoke that strange street Esperanto

only prophets of the Avenues knew:

half prayer, half sneer, wired

into the subways, the rust, the sweat.

Back before the oceans snapped the bridges,

he ran the scene like a barefoot general—

organizing chaos, shouting

down plastique fakers,

fueling nights where distortion met deliverance.

He had that mad clairvoyant look—

the kind that knew art was just

survival in another key.

Staten Island Steve. Tireless. On fire.

Turning abandoned laundromats into temples

of pure feedback slashing down.

We’d haul amps through the rain

as if saving relics from extinction.

He’d grin and say, “Music’s the last

clean currency left, baby—

spend it before they tax your soul.”

When the power grids failed,

he built a rig from scavenged batteries

and played under the Verrazzano moon,

feeding ghosts and half-starved raccoons

the rhythm of resurrection.

I remember his boots, duct-taped and holy.

His eyes, always scanning horizons

as if reading the next apocalypse

before it dropped. He understood

decay like it was an old lover—

respected it, danced with it,

but never let it take the last word.

Steve wasn’t a saint—

he could rage like an oil fire,

laugh at the wrong time,

disappear for months in search of something new.

But when he hit that first chord,

the air itself seemed to change allegiance—

matter remembered how to move once more.

So if the world’s gone, and you find

a tape marked Dream Smashes,

play it loud. That’s Steve out there—

still calling punks to rise,

mocking oblivion

with a power chord and crooked spit.

I salute him—

the earthy, authentic, unkillable

pulse of what was sublime

before and after the end.