There’s a man in my phone saved under the little poison bottle emoji. No name. He started as his actual name and got demoted to DO NOT after one spectacularly bad-for-me weekend in October. The emoji came later, when my best friend grabbed my phone at brunch and renamed him herself as a public service. I answer him anyway. Every time, usually within four minutes, occasionally while my friends watch me do it over mimosas with the disappointed faces of women who have all done the same thing for worse men. Here’s what they refuse to say out loud: some men are worth the trouble specifically because they’re trouble, and the version of me that shows up when he calls is my favorite fucking version. She wears the good perfume. DazAstir wrote ‘Poison’ about her, about every woman who picked the gorgeous disaster on purpose, and he set it to synths slinky enough to make the choice sound obvious.
DazAstir is a British pop artist with a taste for glossy synths and after-dark drama and his sound brings the neon glow of the ’80s into the present with enough heat to make common sense clock out early. He writes with real melodrama – the kind that makes an ordinary crush feel like it deserves opening credits. This song is about a woman choosing a destructive attachment because the intensity makes her feel more alive than safety ever has. She knows this man cannot offer a future she can hold onto. He has a talent for pulling her close without ever truly belonging to her so she treats every risk as part of the seduction. The real ache comes from how willingly she hands herself over. She is not confused about his limitations. She is making a conscious, reckless little bargain: give me the fire and the high. Give me one night where I can disappear into you. I will deal with the damage later. It is devotion with a death wish, the kind where she would rather be temporarily consumed than sit alone with the absence. I know better. I just didn’t care is basically the whole fucking mood.
The opening lines lay the whole deal on the table before the chorus ever arrives. “Cover me in your poison tonight / I’m willing to risk it all for the ride / If it kills me, I’ll still ask for more / I want whatever that you’ve got in store.” She’s negotiating from a position of full information and she wants the terms anyway. I respect the hell out of a woman who reads the fine print and signs in lipstick. DazAstir lays it over a slow-ass synth pulse built for after midnight, the sound of a decision already made in the parking lot.
Advertisement
Then she gets honest about what he is. “You don’t promise anything that you can keep / Still I’m falling deeper than I know I should be / You don’t heal me, you just undo me real slow / And I don’t care, I let it show.” No delusions anywhere in those lines. She has him fully catalogued and she’s leaning in regardless, and that shit is the reason the track reads true instead of tragic. Plenty of songs frame wanting the wrong man as a confession. This one files it under preferences.
The next lines are where the song stops pretending to be subtle. “Every reason telling me to run / Gets quiet in the moment when you come / If it’s wrong, then I guess I don’t wanna be right / I’d rather be burnt by your light.” Yes that line means what you think it means and DazAstir sings it with a straight fucking face which somehow makes it filthier. The logic here is airtight girl math. The argument against him only exists when he’s across town, and up close everything goes silent except him. She’s borrowing from the oldest slow-jam commandment on the books too, and if loving wrong is a crime she’s pleading guilty with her heels still on.
Verse two turns the temperature up on the unspoken. “You don’t say it, but I feel it when we meet / Like a live spark running wild underneath / You don’t love me you just pull me in too close / And I give in I lose control.” Anyone who’s stood too near a man like this knows the current she’s describing – that hum that starts before either of you touches anything and it’s distracting as hell. He never has to announce a thing. Proximity does the talking and she translates fluently. Naming what he won’t give her in the same breath she surrenders is the hottest kind of honesty, the eyes-open kind.
By the back half of the song the internal argument is over. “Every warning light is fading at your touch / Turns to nothing when I’m needing you this much / If it breaks me, I won’t walk away tonight / burn me up when I’m inside.” That last line is the boldest damn moment on the track and he doesn’t blink. The dashboard of her better judgment goes dark one bulb at a time and she watches it happen with her seatbelt already off. Want at that volume rewrites everything, and the song knows staying is the whole point of the night.
Advertisement
Her closing run is the whole surrender written out in full. “Say the word I’ll disappear / Even though I’d rather have you near / If it means I don’t survive / least I’ll be yours while I’m alive / So cover me don’t hold back now / Don’t wanna put this fire out / If I break, let it be true / I’d risk it all if it’s for you.” She hands him the exit and hopes he never uses it and that’s the most dangerous offer a woman can make – the one where his silence keeps her. On paper it’s devastating and over this production it turns into a dare. She’s daring him to match her, and the girls who play it that way always come home with the material.
That poison bottle emoji lit up my screen while I was drafting this, and the timing was so perfect I laughed out loud. I let it sit for a whole song’s length to prove I could before answering with a grin my brunch table would recognize instantly. DazAstir gets it. ‘Poison’ works because he wrote the want honestly and skipped the cautionary-tale packaging, and any woman with her own emoji contact knows the difference. My friends can keep the disappointed faces. I walked away with the stories.
