Tom Lyden is a local poet who has had work published in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. He is very influenced by music and nature, and is currently organising The Basket House group, an arts collective which stages weekly readings and events in Clifden during the summer.

A Tribute to Clifden's BasketHouse Collective

Sometimes the small town really gets me down
I hear a guitar strumming
Or is it the banshee wailing for my soul?
Claustrophobia locks me in
Am I being caged for some imaginery sin?
Who's that bored person there,
Surely that can't be me!
Who's that person who they say is really
Out of his tree?
Sometimes all the hipsters turn out to be saddoes,
No rhyme or happy home.
Some burnt out genius ready to fall
There's a bad trip
Every time I fall from grace
Right flat on my face
There's another guy now who
Used to be in a grunge band
And his father brought him home
To work on the land
He built a scarecrow
That looks like a cross
Between Kurt Cobain and Charles Haughey
Sometimes when he's ploughing
He dreams of the 13th Floor Elevators
And why the Foo Fighters should
Go away and die
There's a lot of sons like that
Of farmers and business men
Shackled to the old man's place
There's an aura around our Connemara hill
A rainbow that's in awe of all its wayward sons
Reluctantly returning
But I love those jaded ones
All those jesters, poets and mad men
They don't make guitar strings in these hills
But we've been thrown down a line
And it's put such fire in our bones
What the hell am I talking about because
I used to think that I was bored
But now I'm surrounded by dreamers,
Visionarys, and others of that ilk
There's a storm brewing that's making us all click
There's that sound again of a labourer's son bursting into song
He's playing that song like he's lost something
Down at the crossroads and maybe he has but now he's star-crossed
And imbued with passion
The small town now makes me feel like there's light on
My shoes
There's a cymbal crashing, a piano barrel-housing
There are poets from the firmament and we're going on when we
Can't go on
There's a stage and we're filling it one by one.

Tom Lyden