If music is easier to write than words, then if you are trying to write a song then you will often be in that uncomfortable position of having to reverse the more natural order. In other words, you will often come up with the melody first.
When trying to set a text, I have found that I follow a solution that the text suggests to me. The text is a stimulus and constraint (which is actually easier than composing a melody from scratch.)
A lyric I write after a melody will always sound banal to me.
I saw a girl and she smiled at me
She said her name was Natalie
We shared some laughs and a bottle of wine
I thought that she should be all mine
That's one of the better ones, at least it has the elements of storytelling in a concise way.
In a way it would be a lot to expect, for me to have that skill without working to develop it as much as I work to master piano playing and writing original melodies with their harmonizations. Even though I am a poet the writing of song lyrics is a substantially different skill set, given the type of poet I am.
So I would need to write a different sort of poem, meant as a song lyric in the first place.
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