They say beauty kills you faster than bullets.

They say a death warrant is more deadly when it's signed with blood from your heart on the tissue thin paper of your skin, in a cursive crimson scrawl of love and agony and flowering faith that never wilts no matter how many times it's betrayed.

They say that death isn't destructive unless love is the cause, and they say a blade causes no more damage than the passion that bears it, and that pain isn't painful unless you've known peace beforehand, and they say that Van Gogh ate yellow paint because it made him happy.

They say that love bites more than frost, and that ice is cold but love colder, and that love snatches away fiddling fingers long before frostbite, and that fire is ice, and love is both, and yellow paint makes you happy, but it also kills you, and maybe it's the yellow paint that kills you, or maybe it's the happiness, but nobody knows, because you can't have one without the other, and they say that everyone has their own yellow paint.

They say I hate you and I love you mean different things.

They say Helen of Troy launched a thousand ships with her swift, salty beauty, and that Jesus fed a thousand people with a bit of bread and a bit of fish.

They say not to start all sentences the same way, but life starts the same way for every child with tiny hands and tiny toes that haven't been blackened by frost or love. They say it's messy and bright and red and loud and fire and ice and being loved, but they don't know because they don't remember, and they don't remember because they don't know, and nobody knows, so why can't each story start with the same words, and why can't each sentence be a new story.

They say each line should follow on from another, but life's disjointed, so why can't writing be a shattered, rose-tinted mirror that reflects and distorts reality to be what we want it to be. They say life has no continuity, but they don't want their stories to match.

They say that the colour of the sky is grey, but grey isn't a colour it's a shade, and so the sky can't be grey but it can be yellow and purple together, and people can be yellow and purple together because then their bruised hearts are complementary and yellow and purple bruises flower across their tissue paper skin where they press hard to sign their lives away with clotting crimson blood.

They say not to use too many connectives because people need oxygen, but oxygen kills us as well as sustains us, and the sentences taste better when your head's spinning and you float among the lines of the letters that pile up on each other in an orderly jumble of secrets, a code that we're all taught to decipher thoughtlessly or analyse too deeply, and society is based on the rows of meaningless scribbles that they gave meaning to.

They say we can't breathe life into the inanimate, but the letters dance and sing, and are more dangerous than the sharpest lance, because when you take up a pen instead of a sword you can write in the blood of angels and humans and let it mingle on the cream cheese paper.

They say that men of the pen are no more peaceful than men of the sword.

They say when you write you can drive men to suicide and women to prostitution and children to drugs, and you can make ugly things beautiful, and make people love the grumbling engine spewing black magic into the humming toxic air, and the rainbow gleam of an oil spill that clings like a jilted lover to the sleek feathers of icy birds that wash up on the magic blackened shore, and that grey is a pretty shade, and that we don't need colour because monochrome is elegant and beautiful in it's simplicity, and we are doing the world a favour by draining it of the ever irreverent rainbow.

They say you can make them believe that the sky isn't grey, but yellow and purple, and that oxygen kills us, and that a gun can kill the body, but a story can kill the soul.

They say Van Gogh ate yellow paint because it made him happy, and they say that if you write it enough times it's the truth, but if you repeat it once it's become true then it becomes insanity, because insanity is repeating something established as true, but then aren't we all insane, because everything is true to someone.

They say war is insanity, but that love hurts more, and they say sleep deprivation is torture, but that sleeping is worse, because it twists hopes and dreams and loves into a red monster of our own creation, and they say that you can't dream when you're awake, but everyone does, they just don't know it.

They say that writing is pretentious and that metaphors are too strong to represent the irreverent irrelevance of human emotion, and they're probably right, but they wrote that, so its pretentious, but it still counts, because every word ever written on paper or skin or brick is society, and society hasn't crumbled yet.

They say humanity's blue, but that we act red, and that the world's green, but we see it as grey.

They say Van Gogh ate yellow paint because it made him happy, but the paint killed him or the happiness killed him, so what do they know?

They say people are colours, and colours are people, and they say love thumps the air out of your belly and the belly out of the air, and that war does the same.

They say the sky's grey.

They say you shouldn't start each sentence the same way, and they say words have meaning other than what we give them, and that you can't have pain without peace, and that repetition is insanity, and that love and hate are different, and that connectives are bad, and oxygen is good, and maybe they write right, because they made the rules, but the thing is, words are are straight, but their meanings are spirals and helixes and ducking and diving and strafing and we are bombarded by the fully empty air, and we fear nothing and everything, and love is fear, and in the end.

They know nothing.