Six lines are enough for Dave Bonta's "Employed" to take in a whole working life and then turn it inside out. On the surface it is a short complaint about a job: the speaker has "little to do," answers to someone, and does not enjoy it. But the last couplet changes the direction. The speaker stops looking at the work and looks at the self, and what he finds there is grief. The central idea is that servitude, even petty and idle servitude, ends up showing us something sorrowful about ourselves.
The title is worth pausing on. "Employed" is a passive word. Someone is employed by another, the way a tool is employed. The poem never says who the employer is, but the first couplet offers a strange candidate: "with little to do but answer / a little king." The line break matters here. "Answer" hangs at the end of the line, so for a moment the job seems to consist of nothing except answering. Then "a little king" arrives, and the sentence can be read several ways. The speaker might respond to a petty boss, a demanding customer, or a childish tyrant. The poem doesn't say, and that vagueness gives the figure a shadowy power. The word "little" also appears twice in two lines. It shrinks the work ("little to do") and the ruler ("little king") together, so the paradox is clear: a king who is small, and a servant whose duties are small, yet the bond between them is still binding.
The second couplet drops into plain speech: "I do not enjoy my employment." It is a flat, almost bureaucratic sentence, and the understatement hits harder than a shout would. There is also a quiet sound-pattern in it. "Enjoy" and "employment" share the same "oy" sound, so joy is buried inside the very words that name the job, and the speaker has denied it. Then comes the phrase that holds the poem together: "in the service of service." Service serves nothing but more service. No goal, person, or purpose lies beyond it, and the phrase circles back on itself like a closed loop. Because the word also carries religious associations, a reader might hear a faint echo of worship, though the poem gives no sign that it means this. If so, it is an empty ritual.
The final couplet brings the turn. "I see what grief we come to / in our reflections." Two things change at once. The pronoun widens from "I" to "we," so a private grievance becomes a shared condition. And the verb "see" moves the poem from action to vision. The phrase "come to" is also doing double work. It means to arrive at, but it recalls the idiom "come to grief," meaning to fail or meet disaster. "Reflections" likewise has two meanings, mirror images and acts of thought. The poem doesn't say which, and it needs both: we look at ourselves, we think about what we see, and grief is what we find. Judging by the imagery, one possible reading is that the little king and the servant are the same person, and that the self is both the one commanding and the one answering. That is only one reading, but the poem's economy allows it.
The construction supports this restraint. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, and the only capital letters are the two "I"s. The poem begins in lower case, as if in the middle of a thought. It is built from three couplets, and in each one the second line is shorter than the first (roughly eight syllables then four, nine then seven, seven then five). Every couplet seems to sag or trail off at its end, and the last line, "in our reflections," is the shortest and quietest, leaving the reader with an image rather than a conclusion. Repetition does the work that rhyme usually does: "little" echoes "little," and "service" echoes "service."
The poem is significant for how much it leaves out. It doesn't describe an office, name a boss, or explain a grievance. Instead it uses ordinary words to move from boredom to sorrow in six lines, and it trusts the reader to carry the weight of that move. A poem about work that ends in a mirror asks us to consider whom we are really answering to.