Wet Dream in the Land Dry of Justice
September in Indonesia never feels like a month on a calendar — it feels like a wound on repeat, scabbed and ripped open again, an echo chamber of grief wrapped in humidity. Alun-alun transforms into a furnace: bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder, banners like torn skin, fists like broken metronomes against the air.
People don’t come here for ceremony. They come to spill. Rage, sweat, coffe, laughter that borders on hysteria. Bottles smash against pavement, glass turning into glitter under cheap neon. One is a jester with poison in his jokes, mocking religion until the crowd winces, yet somehow laughing anyway. One is a talk-show phantom, smooth as oil, selling comfort in words that taste like ash.One is a politician’s ghost, smiling with a forked tongue, offering promises no one asked for.
They are not saviors. They are mirrors cracked in three. We chase their words because sometimes absurdity is the only compass when truth has been stolen.
Numbers don’t matter here. Five against six. Seven against eight. The arithmetic of protest is always subtraction: you lose before you start, yet you keep moving jakarta, jogja, surabaya, kalimantan city turn into stages, bodies leaping because gravity is honest in a way leaders never are. Bigots sink under their own weight, masks fall, tongues split, three lies spilling at once.
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The night refuses to be a backdrop. It becomes sovereign. Rabbits outrun tortoises because patience is burial. Speed is survival. Kelelawar crowns itself ruler, and we crawl beneath its wings, using the dark as shield, as medicine, as faith.
We scream declarations that sound like curses: we will not be blinded by light, we will not be frozen by grief, we are immune to cheap poison, immune to mediocre nepo baby. God-shaped threats bounce off our skin. Holiness is unnecessary. Purity grows feral in the gutter. Inside us: multiverses swelling like fever. Inside our veins: a thousand reincarnations. Hell gapes open and we run in, grinning, daring the flames to do their worst.
And then comes the silence. It always does. Silence heavier than smoke, heavier than riot shields. Silence presses down like an unwanted god. And in silence, memory ambushes: friends who dressed their bigotry as love, family muting me before I could speak, authorities damning me for being myself. police intel saying hell awaits for chinese., but we are not dump anymore.
Sometimes I want to vanish. Sometimes I think disappearance is the only mercy. But September won’t allow it. September drags me back by the hair, shoves my face into the pavement, whispers: don’t you dare forget.
So we keep coming back. We keep rotting in the plaza. We keep laughing like hyenas at sermons, puking slogans on banners, drinking cheap coffee until the cops look like cartoon villains. We don’t gather because of hope — we gather because despair tastes better when it’s shared, when it’s loud, when it reeks.
This isn’t a dream, it’s a hangover that never ends. A wet dream in a land dry of justice, sticky with smoke and spit. No resolution. No prayer. No redemption. Just more fire, more shit, more rebellion until the elite itself chokes on our noise.
