Michael Peters is, as of 2022, an American poet, musician, writer, and artist. Peters is the author of the “sound-imaging” poem Vaast Bin, published by Calamari Press in 2007. Peters began researching the life of Fleury Colon while working on a PhD at the State University of New York at Albany. As of 2022, Peters serves as a lecturer in English at the State University of New York College at Oneonta and a member of the art rock/noise rock band Poem Rocket.

Auguste (Fleury) Colon was born on September 9, 1905 in Rouen, France, to François Henri Colon and Sylvie-Marie Piroudette Colon. Colon was an architect who studied at L’Ecole d’Architecture and helped to construct the Maginot Line, a defensive structure that was built along the border between France and Germany in the 1930s, prior to World War II. Colon became interested in designing finials (known as "épis" in French), the decorative cone or globe that tops a gable or pinnacle in architecture. Traveling to Montreal, Canada in 1950, Colon built a commune of 16 finial-shaped houses known as Max Épi Maison, or MÉM. Each house was 25 feet high and made of pewter, and Max Épi Maison number 3 (MÉM 3) was designated as Colon's home and observatory. Colon believed that the aerodynamic shape of a finial would lend itself well to space capsule or missile design, and began sending letters to the Canadian Space and Aeronautics Commission on what became an almost daily basis, but was ignored. On May 21, 1964, Colon fell while trying to polish the lens of MÉM 3's telescope, becoming impaled on one of the commune's finial-shaped creations, a doghouse. The finial commune did not survive much longer after Colon's death, and no evidence of it existed when a logging road was built through the area in 1972.