I've found this thread baffling because most of the quoted lyrics actually aren't bad or embarrassing, and some of them are actually very good! It's confusing to me to see Nicks fans posting that seem to think everything she writes is trite.
I've always figured Nicks lyrics are wordy and vague snapshots of what was happening in her life at the time. If you don't have the context, as most of the time we don't, I can see that sometimes they'd be baffling if you were trying to read them as being literal. So she's often verbose and not totally clear, but that doesn't mean she's bad.....somehow people still connect to her songs even though they're really basically personal mythology from her life.
The only lyrics of hers that I dislike (and not saying they are bad lyrics, just that I don't personally like them) are where she ties a song way too closely to a particular event/time. "Desert Angel" doesn't work for me because it's too specific. "Illume" and "Soldier's Angel" are better because the lyrics are disassociated enough to make them more universal. I can listen to the latter two anytime and connect with the loss and tragedy they are communicating; I listen to "Desert Angel" and the shout outs to "Operation Desert Angel!" at the end just totally blows it for me.
And many of her lines are really great:
He was singing, and undoing the laces...undoing the laces "Sara"
To survive the distance everyone fights...everyone fights...and the fire flies "Fireflies"
I've shaken your faith in me...No, you've shaken my faith in everything else "Thrown Down"
Must secret loves secretly die? "Secret Love"
Long nets of white cloud my memory "Rooms On Fire" (startling, when you consider she was basically subconsciously reflecting on what Klonopin was doing to her before she consciously realized it!)