SHADES OF STARK

Poems to Songs

These songs began as poems — written through love, trust and the belief that what existed between us was real. When distance became sudden silence, and silence gave way to questions and deception, the words could no longer remain only on the page.

SHADES OF STARK brings together the songs born from two relationships at the heart of this story—one remembered as the Tiger, the other as my Lion Heart.

P · E/Z — The Tiger and My Lion Heart

Each song carries a different shade of what I lived — love, hope, longing, absence, doubt, grief, truth and survival. What could no longer remain only on the page became music.

LISTEN TO THE SHADES OF STARK PLAYLIST ON YOUTUBE →

What I gave was real
What I suffered was real
Now let my own voice carry me through the pain and darkness.
I will silence neither —
I will not let what he did become the end of me
I will give it words — and let my voice lead me back to myself

— M. L. Stark
3 September 2026 · 03:33

I Don’t Want to Wake Up – The Song That Started It All

It started with a dream — not the kind you forget when you wake, but the kind that quietly stays with you. Somewhere between memory and reality, it began to feel real. This is the song that began the SHADES OF STARK journey.

I Don’t Want to Wake Up began as a poem written in the middle of the night after a vivid dream about the man I called my Lion Heart. By then, he was no longer only a presence at the other end of messages and conversations. We had finally met face-to-face in Thailand in July 2025, turning something that had existed across distance into something I had actually seen, heard and touched.

Yet even after Thailand, he continued to find his way into my dreams. On this particular night, I woke at 3:17 with the feeling of him still extraordinarily close. I had been talking to him inside the dream, asking questions that remained with me after I opened my eyes. Then, in the quiet of the night, three soft Snapchat sounds broke through — a strange collision between what I had just dreamed and the waking world around me.

I began writing. At first, it was simply a personal message — an attempt to capture what had just happened and the unsettling feeling of not quite knowing where the dream ended and reality began. What started as personal messages became a poem, the poem became lyrics, and eventually those lyrics evolved into my very first song — the first song I had ever created — for STARKLYNX Music.

That is why I Don’t Want to Wake Up means more to me than being the first song I released. It marks the moment when my poetry stepped beyond the page and became music — and, without my knowing it at the time, the beginning of what would eventually become SHADES OF STARK.

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BETWEEN THE CITIES (If You Could Hear My Heart)

BETWEEN THE CITIES (If You Could Hear My Heart) is the answering voice to BEFORE THE SILENCE CAME.

On 28 July 2025, while I was still living inside the uncertainty of what was happening between us, I wrote a poem to him from my heart. He answered me with a poem of his own.

A year later, my words became BEFORE THE SILENCE CAME — and his answer became BETWEEN THE CITIES.

For me, the two songs belong together. One carries my heart to him. The other carries his words back to me.

His poem came on 28 July 2025. The following day, we were together again in Thailand. In the days that followed, conversations between us went far beyond love and distance. He acknowledged that what had been done to me through the company he worked for, Global Publishing Agency, had been a scam.

Yet the tenderness in his poem was not an isolated moment. Some of the other words woven into BETWEEN THE CITIES came from messages he sent around that same period — words of love, reassurance and a future he continued to speak about as though it belonged to us.

Just over two weeks later, on 14 August 2025, everything broke apart.

That is one of the contradictions I still hear inside this song. I don’t have to decide for the listener which words were true and which were not. I can only place them where they actually occurred: extraordinarily close to the ending.

What makes the song particularly heartbreaking for me now is the hope that still lives inside his words. This isn’t the voice of someone speaking about a love that is already over. He still says, “I still believe in us.” He still says, “I love you.” He still speaks about the future we had imagined and about wanting to “build every scene of your poem into our reality.”

He even refuses to speak about us in the past tense: “Let’s not mourn a story still being written.” Listening to those words now is extraordinarily difficult, because I know what the voice inside the song does not yet know — how little time remained before everything between us would change.

The line that breaks my heart most now is the one that closes the song: “Silence is never the end of our story.” Because, only a short time later, silence was exactly what came. That is why BETWEEN THE CITIES still affects me so deeply. It preserves the voice I was hearing before the silence — before I knew how abruptly that voice would disappear.

🎵 Listen on YouTube →

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Some stories don’t begin with heartbreak. They begin with love.

BEFORE THE SILENCE CAME began with a poem I wrote to my Lion Heart while I was still living the story — still loving, still hoping, but beginning to ask questions I could no longer ignore.

The poem grew out of a long night in Thailand. We were staying in separate hotel rooms, corresponding for hours through Zoom while I tried to explain something that mattered deeply to me: asking him for the truth did not mean I wanted to leave. I was asking because I loved him with my entire being — to the moon and the stars and back again — and because I wanted the truth to give us a way forward, not tear us apart.

By then, I needed answers about who he really was, where he truly came from, and the real identity behind the name I had known him by. I also needed answers about Global Publishing Agency — the company he had worked for — the company I had paid a substantial amount of money to handle my author portfolio and extensive marketing, the way he and other people connected to the company had behaved, and why they had suddenly seemed to disappear into thin air when questions began to be asked. None of those questions meant that I had stopped loving him. Quite the opposite. I was trying to understand how the man I loved fitted into everything I was beginning to uncover — and whether, after all the lies, there was finally a truth we could move forward with together.

As our conversation continued through the night and into the early hours of the morning, I kept trying to make him understand that I could handle the truth. What I could no longer handle were more lies. Eventually, between four and five in the morning, I went to his room so we could talk face-to-face. What stayed with me was how understanding he was with me throughout that night. I wasn’t asking him to be perfect. I was asking him to trust me enough to tell me the truth about himself — and about the company I had trusted for three years and paid a substantial amount of money, to handle my author portfolio and extensive marketing.

Out of that night came the poem that would become BEFORE THE SILENCE CAME. Exactly one year later, that poem found its way back to me as music. The same story, told in two different musical versions.

This story still touches my heart deeply in a way I find difficult to explain. Perhaps because I now know what I could not have known when I wrote those words — what would happen only a few weeks later. When I listen to BEFORE THE SILENCE CAME today, I don’t only hear the questions I was asking. I hear how much I still loved my Lion Heart, how much I still believed in us, and how desperately I wanted the truth to give us a way forward.

I had no idea how little time was left before everything would change.

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