I got a $50.00 gift certificate for books on my birthday last July.  Excited, I scanned the bargain shelf excavating for secrets and locked doors of hermetic volumes to unleash poetry  or some exorcism or other.  Got two gigantic tomes of art reproductions.  Picasso and Van Gogh.  The cover of the Van Gogh features that goofy portrait with the bandaged ear and the fur cap, painful, reddened eyes, pursed mouth, schizophrenic skin.  Lost soul.  By contrast, Picasso is the picture of health, making others  do his suffering for him.  Hell, I confound myself with both of them and now they are mine, pasted up in cardboard, neatly caught and locked down on the white craftsman bookshelf angled in the corner of my one room apartment, alphabetized, tamed, owned and captured with the thousand other books creeping along my  tastefully beige walls.  Safe art in a safe house.  Books are dangerous, they say, and I know its true because quite often at night I wake up dreaming of the coming earthquake and fancy all those books falling like comets from the walls to smother me as the building sways like the mast of a ship on a turbulent ocean.  But at the moment, this exact second, five fifty one on Monday morning, they all sit safely, their occult virtue to work change hidden, although I know I could listen with righteous ears flapping and catch them out whispering to one another conspiring my madness like plotting spiders:  Picasso pissing and giggling at tortured Vincent who tosses his ear like a beanbag and grimaces madly at my sleeping figure while two dimensional wire bulls move like the ghosts of buffalo at the foot of my bed.