Composing Songs in Nonfluent Language

I was just messing around with Lojban words and some basic tones, trying to make a coherent song when I noticed that composing in another language is a lot harder than just speaking in it. Of course, composing rhythmic lyrics in one's one native language is more difficult than just speaking, but it appeared that the two difficulties - meter and syntax - were more than summed. That is because, when speaking a language in which one is fluent, words can just be shoved together and permuted a little bit. However, when trying to write a song or poem in a different language, the text must first be translated. Especially in Lojban, translations can have wildly different syllable counts than in the native language. So, it's necessary to keep trying different ways of expressing a similar idea, selbri if you will, and translating it to see if it fits. It's a little bit easier in languages that use cmavo - particles - for grammar structure because a lot of them can be elided. However, that leads to some inconsistency in formality when trying to pack utterances of different lengths into a uniform meter. Of course, if writing for a language most people don't know, it's OK if it's not fully valid grammar!