Lyrics are not complete as poetry. They are created with an additional element, and you just can’t take that away- it’s like printing a poem without any vowels. The music is integral to the form- most of the time.
And, yes, there are poets that write poems that can be set to music- Leonard Cohen, of course of course of course. Of course, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits… Marc Bolan wrote funny little sonnets and sestinas and sang them to a rockabilly beat. Some Beatles lyrics are utterly poetic “in their own write.”
But, as Pete Townsend said-
“It’s the singer not the song
That makes the music move along”
And for the most part, that’s true, it’s the melody, and the production, and the singer that takes the partial art of the lyric and turns it into the complete artform which is the song. Why am I thinking about this? Because yesterday, I wrote lyrics for the very first time- I’ve never been able to do that before! And the thing that I finally learned- was to leave room for the music. You have to let the music complete the song. You have to see the words as a piece of the work, not the whole. That was something like an orgasmic enlightenment kinda thing!
Frozen sea
We got a cold, cold moon, we got this dying tree
We got the kind of love and hate that never lets us be
I got a frostbite kind of life
You got the snake oil cure
It’s hardly worth to struggle that’s one thing I feel for sure
Even though I know the score, I know I need to be
Trying to walk back to you over this frozen sea
In the ice age, in the ice age of the heart
Your heart as sharp as cactus, your beauty like a rose
You always write the final song, you know just how it goes,
The smoke stings my eyes
The ice forms in your hair
The veil is drawn like a charcoal sketch between us in the air
Even though I know the score, I know I need to be
Trying to walk back to you over this frozen sea
In the ice age, in the ice age of the heart
Drive the metal out of Detroit drive my mind into the dust
You’re the graven image made of candle light and lust
The insubstantial memory
Of what we were before
The thing that keeps on halting me before I reach the door
No matter what I do and say, you know you’ll always see
Me walking back to you across this frozen sea
In the ice age, in the ice age of the heart
(taken from my old journal back in 2010)