Moraira is a small coastal resort about an hour’s drive from Alicante.
MORAIRA 1.
We each of us carry a strange portfolio
of ghosts and vipers
spiny things and ticks that burrow
wherever we go.
And self-securing then self-releasing
like a magical Gladstone bag,
it can hold in check and then deliver all
at the sudden doorway of the moment.
Here, the sliders, the shiny-shelled, the leggy things
are eclipsed in nature: walls and trees bear their weight
in a symbiosis of colour, form and texture.
Good to see them free, untrammeled,
where they ought to be amongst the webs,
the moth husks and the tendrils.
And the ghosts:
each baggy, flapping bedsheet sham
caught by the hem amongst alien thorns
as long as bread knives, caught
on the rough-tongued bark
of the Bismarck palms, until
blue dawn finds them
white, creased and silent.
sisyphus 
I’ve sat on this for a while trying to frame a half-decent comment but if I don’t say something I’ll forget completely. It’s already slipped down the to-do pile. Let me just say how much I enjoyed… I suppose I can only call it the mouth feel of this poem. Yes, that’s as good an expression as any. I haven’t tried to read it aloud—not really my thing—but I don’t need to to say that. What I mean, I think, is that the musicality of the poem is quite overpowering and meaning has to take second place or maybe third or fourth because the music takes up more than its fair share. That’s not a bad thing. Just think of John Cooper Clarke.
Happy to have popped out sideways from your to-do pile, Jim! I’m delighted to have the poem assessed for its mouth-feel. I do read bits out loud constantly during the process of putting a poem together and how it settles in the oral cavity and then emerges vocally are of major priority. So praise for the music therein is welcome and thank you. (Weirdly, whilst writing it in Spain as I did, the sound of John Cooper Clark’s Manchester scally sneer wrapping itself around the three syllables of ‘Majorca’ came into my mind more than once!)