“Pwazon” — Kreyòl for “poison” — is one of the standout tracks from Harmonik’s 2022 album Maturité, a duet built around Troubleboy’s guest verse and credited to songwriters Mackendy “McD” Talon, Sanders Solon, and Troubleboy himself. Nearly six minutes long, the song has become one of the group’s most talked-about releases for how bluntly it turns the language of addiction into the language of love.
A Relationship Described as an Illness
The song’s central device is medical, not romantic. The narrator doesn’t describe heartbreak in the usual terms of longing or betrayal — he describes it as a diagnosis. The person he loves is framed simultaneously as the disease and the only available treatment, a paradox the chorus returns to again and again: she is both what’s making him sick and the one thing he reaches for to feel better. That circular logic — needing the very thing that’s hurting you — is the emotional engine of the entire track.
The verses build toward that idea gradually. Early on, the narrator describes wanting to push her away and pull her closer in the same breath, a contradiction that sets up everything that follows: a partner who takes and never gives back, who seems to draw energy from causing pain rather than easing it. There’s a recurring accusation of role reversal, too — the narrator suggests that the one causing harm is the one acting wounded, playing the victim while doing the damage.
Troubleboy’s Verse: From Description to Confession
Where Harmonik’s verses describe the dynamic from the outside, Troubleboy’s guest verse pulls the perspective inward. He shifts into first person to admit that he no longer trusts what she says, that her words and her actions don’t match, and that the confusion between joy and sadness has become constant — contentment feels hidden, and sorrow feels like the default state whenever there’s conflict between them. He goes further than Harmonik’s half of the song by naming the cost directly: he says he doesn’t need to be told what love costs, because he’s already paying that price, even as it destroys him.
That’s also where the title’s full metaphor arrives. The hook doesn’t stop at “poison” — it extends the comparison to kleren (raw cane liquor) and to spoiled food: something the narrator knows, going in, will hurt him — a headache, a stomachache — and drinks or eats anyway, because he can’t stop himself. It’s a strikingly literal description of compulsion, dressed in the imagery of a love song but structured like a description of substance dependency.
Why the Metaphor Lands
What makes “Pwazon” resonate beyond a typical breakup song is that it refuses the two easiest resolutions a konpa love song usually reaches for: reconciliation or a clean walkaway. The narrator explicitly says he doesn’t know what more to give, that he’s tired of fighting for peace that never comes — and yet the record ends not with closure but with a repeated cry for “solo,” a plea to be freed from the cycle rather than a declaration that he already has been. The song sits in that unresolved middle place, which is arguably the most honest thing about it: it doesn’t resolve the addiction it describes, because addiction — romantic or otherwise — rarely resolves on the songwriter’s timeline.
Musically, that tension is carried by the arrangement as much as the lyrics — a duet structure where Harmonik and Troubleboy trade the role of narrator without ever really talking to each other, each locked in his own version of the same complaint. It’s a fitting shape for a song about a relationship where neither party is actually listening to the other.
“Pwazon” doesn’t try to moralize about toxic relationships or offer a way out. It sits inside the feeling and describes it precisely — which is likely why, three years after Maturité‘s release, it remains one of the album’s most replayed tracks.
