Skips in lyricsto

[David Feuer]

Is there an easy way to deal with skips in lyricsto?  My experience
suggests that there need to be as many \skip invocations as there are
notes/melismata to be skipped, and that to avoid bar check failures,
the skips should not span measures.  This recently led me to use

 \skip 8. \skip 16 \skip 2.

to match the notes

b'8 g16 a16 ~ | a2 r4

which is anything but natural.  How should I have handled this?

David