Last Days of Planet Alert

The last days on Planet Alert were hilarious, the people were overcome with one
prodigious spectacle and/or absurdity after another. You could say that this was the
planet that literally died laughing, as scores of tame lions playfully invaded the gambling
casinos along the coast, and comedy marksmen conducted ritual fake assassinations
of shoppers in the towering glass plaza whose mirrors brought in telescopic
images from other places in the universe--purportedly, but they were probable
spliced in cuts from glossy magazines. Bad but inspired performance artists set up
on makeshift podiums everywhere, even where there was no audience to gather, and
set about with their rhythmic babbling--the final spluttering incantations of a language
that, finally, was exhausted of meaning and could find no register of thought
in anyone. Also, people started riding horses, and playing pianos, and the government
(the heretofore invisible government) just in time unveiled the results of its
secret project, a sky-clock that, though time didn't really exist on this planet, mimicked
a countdown of the last twenty-four hours and then exploded into ten thousand tons of harmless colorful confetti very reminiscent of . . . something! And everybody
was empowered with the ability to have hallucinations, which helped them all forget
any semblance of a life they might have seemed to have had, and, frankly, no one will
ever know what happened to everybody, because the whole planet disappeared, the
ground under their feet first, then the fixtures of the setting just hanging in the air,
and then the people, apparently, leaving nothing but their imaginings, I fear, those
wisps and warps, I mean hooves and flying scarves briefly assuming the shapes of
plummeting birds of death . . . yes, a few shouts and whispers unattached to any
beings . . . to join the wind that from the beginning was the offspring of a chuckle, of
an angel, at the right-hand of the Lord.