The word "work" never appears in Dave Bonta's six lines, and neither does "Protestant." Everything the title promises has to be assembled from what the poem lets us see: a blank, a venture, and a list of things the speaker calls his own. The phrase in the title is a familiar label for the idea, famously discussed by Max Weber, that disciplined labor and worldly success carry religious weight. The poem shows that idea from the inside, as a way of speaking and then a way of counting.
The first stanza sounds almost cheerful. "A blank / for me to fill / is a great venture to venture." The blank could be a form, an empty page, an empty day, or an empty self waiting to be made useful. "Fill" is the verb of an obedient clerk. Then comes the pun, with "venture" used first as a noun and then as a verb. The word belongs to business, as in venture capital, and to risk, as in venturing a guess. The line has the bounce of a motivational slogan, and its circularity gives it away. A great venture is to venture, and nothing is said about what is gained. The enthusiasm feeds on itself, which is how a work ethic can feel from within.
The second stanza removes the commas and the verbs. "my service my brother my wife my God / my profits my money my chest my life / my sleep." The word "my" comes nine times, and without punctuation each item has equal weight. A brother sits beside profits, and God sits at the end of a line like the last entry in an inventory. "Service" can mean religious worship, hired labor, or duty to others, and the poem lets all three meanings blur. "Chest" is another double word. It might be a strongbox, as in a treasure chest, or the ribcage that holds the heart, and it sits between "money" and "life" as if the two were interchangeable. The absence of verbs matters too. The speaker never says what he does with these things, whether he gives them, risks them, or merely owns them. Because the first stanza spoke of a venture, readers are tempted to supply "stake," and the list then reads as a gambler's pile of chips. It can equally be heard as possessiveness, a man counting what is his.
The sound reinforces this pressure. Each of the first two lines of the list has four insistent beats, with "my" pushing into the stress that follows, so they read like a drumbeat. The lines nearly rhyme at their ends and quite plainly inside: "wife" in the first line is answered by "life" in the second. A wife and a life are pulled into the same sound, and in this economy they are traded alike. Then the pattern collapses. "My sleep" stands alone, short and unstressed, a line that seems to drift off. It is also the most intimate item, the one thing the other claims have to consume before anything else can be done. The list moves from relationships and belief to money and then to the body, and the last thing it reaches is rest itself. After sleep there is nowhere further to go. The line may also hint at death, but the poem leaves that to the reader.
The poem is significant because it compresses a large cultural argument into a few seconds of reading. The opening stanza uses the language of enterprise, and the second shows how that language spreads until God, family, and rest are all denominated in the same possessive. Bonta never condemns the speaker, and no moral is stated. The speaker sounds proud, even eager, and the damage shows only in the grammar, where everything becomes "mine" and so becomes something to spend. A quieter poem might have complained about overwork. This one lets a blank form, a pun, and a list of nine "my"s show what happens when the self is treated as capital.