How do I keep space between staves reasonable?

[Kevin Cole]

I'm sorry I don't know how to create a minimal working example.

I have a rather simple melody with a single staff (vocal). Under the
staff I have two stanzas of lyrics (the first verse and the chorus).
After the score, I have a \markup section with additional verses.

When I have just the first verse, everything looks fine. When I add
the chorus, the spaces where I have \break become ridiculously large,
as LilyPond tries to anticipate my needs, and forces the \markup
section to a new page and vertically justifies / fills the page.

On the surface, what I want to do seems deceptively simple.

I've experimented with annotate-spacing and system-system-spacing to
no avail. The truth is I don't really understand what I'm looking at
with all the various distances. (In the annotated PDF, it looks like I
want to shrink "extra dist (system-system-spacing)".)

If I tightened the space between the \break's I think everything would
remain on one page.

Or, if I can't do that, and it has to force the \markup additional
verses to a new page, it still seems weird to have so much whitespace
between \break's. I think it would look better with all the whitespace
at the end of the score...