"Environmentalists and neighborhood groups in Charlestown and Cambridge are gearing up a last-ditch campaign to block state environmental approvals for the Central Artery project's 16-lane Scheme Z interchange. Mayor Flynn met yesterday with Charlestown residents to hear their concerns that the 11-story, 700-foot-wide structure, which would cover an area the size of Boston Common at the northern entrance to the city, would overwhelm their neighborhood with visual blight, shadows, noise and air pollution." - Peter J. Howe, Boston Globe Staff

Watch the lost homes-pebbles fall across the levels
of distrust in the form of broken decks, cinderblocks, & metal.
Twisted rebar scars the insignificant, as the city starts
to give in to the last minute heartache in Cambridge.
Sucking dust fog misers through clots of cloth fibers,
searching for our front door under spores of hot tires.

Cambridge, MA: June 12, 1971


Grass noels and swinging feet traded for gravel and industry,
for profitable rather than placement in a jaded synergy.
Dope sales fail as the streets spar for the right to live in spark;
community implodes for peeks at lightening bugs in jelly jars.
Stick your tongue out and capture black winter from
the side of ditch as the plow rolls down the cracks; lick the
dirty snow as is blows off the overpass into your lungs.

"The grotesque monstrosity that will be the new Central Artery requires a certain power of imagination to be grasped. Maybe that's why people are only now beginning to get upset about it." - Robert Campbell, Boston Globe Correspondent

As the dandelion's backs collapse, and we find sun
from under the black lungs of central arteries hung,
the nooses drip sandy skies along youth blessed limbs
gone spry, while the knots clot and streets lose lives.
From box tops on Boston blood clots, I sift shadows
of lost Monday flowers wondering where the sun's gone,
and why the last note I saw was the pallbearer of gun shot.

"Several environmental leaders and employees within state environmental agencies are accusing the Dukakis administration of bending and sidestepping environmental protection regulations in a rush to obtain final approvals for the $5 billion Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel project."

Hostility mounts sounds of desperation, on concrete grounds
grasping threads of light now, from the cracks of center stages.
Faces grow pale in the midnight months, days know no sail,
The slate strips lives as son's grip knives; take the veil,
close your eyes to your own unsure crimes of hope
and desperate times........................... we're all blind,
it's time to learn life's loopholes of fallen nights.

Sources in state government said that Environmental Affairs Secretary John P. DeVillars and agency heads under him have been facing intense pressure from Artery officials to approve a proposed 16-lane interchange called Scheme Z despite possible infringements on protected parkland at the mouth of the Charles River and questions about adherence to environmental review procedures." - Peter J. Howe, Boston Globe Staff

Beneath the artery overpass, a city screams,
a city chokes debris and midnight masterpiece,
and from the Central Artery we live life as Z
... the long forgot community.