Did you know that Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange is a poet? With the help of the Way Back Machine, we look into the troubled soul of a freedom fighter. In one poem, he meets a tiger in a golden meadow.

Hungry Beast did a web archive search and came up on Assange's old website, which he used frequently in 2006-07. There's a lot to look at there, and much of it is pretty weird. Here are a few samples of his poetry:

Tue 24 Oct 2006 : The Strawberry
 I was travelling across a golden meadow when I encountered the tiger. I fled, with the tiger close behind. 

Coming to a precipice, I caught hold of a wild vine and swung myself over the edge. The tiger sniffed my scent above. 

Trembling, I looked down to the beach far below and saw a second tiger pacing the sands. Only the vine sustained me. 

Two mice, one black and one white, came out of a crevice and started to gnaw away at the vine. 

I saw a luscious strawberry nearby. Grasping the vine with one hand I picked it with the other. How sweet it tasted!

Drugs.

Thu 03 Aug 2006 : Taming the inner rat.
 Don't worry about self flagellating Christian guilt mania diet nonsense. Think about how much you eat.

Assange is no fan of the South Beach Diet.

Thu 29 Jun 2006 : Krill to the baleen of the feminine
 I've always found women caught in a thunderstorm appealing … I found myself loving a girl who was a coffee addict. I would make a watery paste of finely ground coffee and surreptitiously smear this around my neck and shoulders before seducing her so she would associate my body with her dopaminergic cravings.

Gross.

Wed 27 Sep 2006 : If you saw
 If you saw two bodies entwirled in the dance

Bound to each other with effortless grace,

Joyous, momentous, elliptical grace! 


They whirled through the ether, in delicate spirals,

For eons they danced, until in the blink

Of proverbial eyes, one crossed o'er the brink:

One caught a cancer, and started to brew

And choke and ferment and splutter and spew,

Find itself overtaken, cauterised, bled,

Starved, smothered, covered in rash

Wheezing away, overheated with fever

Till it could dance no more, it could not keep step

As it coughed up its blood, and collapsed in a spasm,

And cancer descended on dancers romancing

The universe, and time; and life, in time,

Till the life turned malignant and tripped up the dance:

What if you knew that the cancer was you?

This one starts off nice, then midway through starts getting a little disturbing and ends on a pretty depressing note. But such is life for the world's most important source of classified information.

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