The Power of Performance – why Moon’s poetry truly comes alive when spoken aloud.
Project 52 For 26 has always been about voices – singular, striking, often surprising – and this week’s featured poet, Moon, brings all three in abundance. Their chosen piece arrives as an excerpt from a much larger meditation on gender, though it has long since taken on a life of its own. What began as a section within a broader work has become, almost reluctantly, their “party piece”: the poem they are most often asked to perform, the one audiences lean into, the one people carry home afterwards.
And it’s easy to understand why. Even on the page, the rhythm pulses, the language shifts and shimmers, and the honesty cuts through with a clarity that feels both intimate and defiantly public. Moon freely admits that the piece is best heard aloud – punctuation, they concede with a smile, is not their strongest suit – but that looseness, that organic cadence, is precisely what gives the poem its electricity. It feels lived rather than engineered.
Moon themselves is as compelling as the work they create. Nonbinary, neurodiverse, and living with physical disabilities and deformities in their legs and feet. They use the proudly self-applied label “ND Enby Crip” – not as provocation, but as truth. Identity, in Moon’s practice, isn’t a banner to wave but a terrain to navigate, and the poem reflects that ongoing, open-ended journey.
Originally from Cornish stock and now rooted on the Wirral, Moon moves fluidly between disciplines: artist, writer, performer. Their work, like their life, resists neat categorisation. What unites it is a commitment to candour, to craft, and to the difficult beauty that emerges when a voice refuses to shrink to fit.
This week’s Project 52 For 26 feature is not merely a poem. It’s an invitation – to listen, to reflect, and, crucially, to feel. Moon’s words stay with you. And perhaps that’s the point, don’t you think?
ENBY
I am enby/nonbinary. Mine is a code which goes beyond more than ones and zeros. I reject the skins of the hers and hims. I am They and I play in gender’s alleyways. I am skipping rope and hopscotch, Top Trumps and bulldogs, What’s The Time Mr Wolf?, conkers and marbles. I turn bin lids into shields, gravel tracks into fields, and I will defend my turf from TERFs and their abject ideals. I wave my arse at the farce THEY call science; its enforced compliance. I will be free. I will be me: the light in their darkness; the loose thread in their smartness. I will unravel them and their ken for I am the fact to their fiction; the serene to their friction. I bring anarchy to their certainty and I flex in the complexity of all that is me.
I accept no limitations. I am no imitation. I am my own creation. My own revelation. I may be a Moon but I’m not a phase. This Moon stays, to provoke thought. Yes, I am the woke sort. Not the bloke sort. Nor the femme. But Them: Nonbinary in my finery. Moon. Fine-tuned. Thank you.
MOON
