Amy Clampitt - A New Life lyrics

Autonomy these days – surprise! – is moving up in the corporate structure. She's thrown over the old laid-back lifestyle, repudiated its green-haired prophets, and gotten married (pre-Raphaelite red velvet, a sheaf of roses, hair falling in two long blond tresses). She's now at home on a rural route, its row of mailboxes a mile and a half from the Freeway. Not-quite- two-year-old Autonomy Junior spends long days with the sitter, can count up to five, and sees the world moving past so fast, he delivers daily not slow words but quick, predicated word-clusters. Up before dawn three days out of five, at the bathroom mirror Autonomy swiftly, with brush and hairdryer, concocts a frame for her face of that temporal gold, like the gilding of the aspens in the Rockies, like every prototypical true blonde who began as some other color; puts on her boardroom clothes – flounced denim with boots and weskit, or spiked sandals and pallid executive knit – to drive off into the just- stirred mother-of-pearl of the day, the velour of hoarfrost's transient platinum on the blacktop of a piece with the pristine pale upholstery of the brand-new Brougham – into the ductile realm of the Freeway, that reentry into the mystery of being betweenwheres, alone in the effortless anteroom of the Machine, of the Many. The Company these days is paying her way to an earlybird course in Econ at the University. At eight- thirty, while her wedded bedfellow, in the other car, the red Toyota, drops off their offspring with the sitter, her cla** over, she'll be taking the Freeway again to headquarters. These days she's in Quality Circles, a kind of hovering equipoise between Management and not-Management, precarious as the lake-twinned tremor of aspens, as the lingering of the ash-blond arcade of foliage completing itself as it leans to join its own inversion. Whatever fabrication, whatever made thing she is thus vertiginously linked to, there's no disconnecting the image of Autonomy contained but still moving – toward what is unclear – up through the heady apertures of the Gross National Product, from that thing, the ambiguous offspring of the Company – through whose dense mansions, burbling with unheard melodies of the new, her pal and bedfellow is moving up too. Evenings, while he heads for his course at the University, she collects the not-yet-two-year-old from the sitter, kicks off her stiltwalker's footgear, peels away the layers of the persona she takes to Quality Circles, and slides into iron tight jeans, the time-honored armor of mellowing out; picks up yesterday's litter around the playpen, puts together a quick concoction via the microwave oven, and resumes – her charge, all the while, voluble at her hip or underfoot – the improbable game of move-and-countermove-between- mother-and-child. Whether, back at headquarters, back there in the winking imaginary map that leaps from the minds of the computer programmers, there's a mother-lode of still smarter bombs, the germ of an even cleverer provocation to instability within the neutron or of God knows what other, yet inviolate speck at the core of the cosmos, who knows – or whether playing at mothering, the mirage of a rise into ethereal realms of the managerial – of hoarfrost at dawn along the edge of the Freeway, the hurtled ease of finding oneself betweenwheres, alone in the evolving anteroom of the Machine, of that artifice of the pursuit of happiness – will be, as the green-haired prophets of punk would have it, a total, or only partial apocalyptic freakout.