affirmative action

[zorcas]

Excellent post mortem suggesting I stick to rhyme, though the  poetry establishment frowns on it

I wish there was a 'poetry establishment'. Poetry is too insignificant, too niche, too inconsequential a club to support an 'establishment'. The heads of this purported 'establishment' would make less money than a 30 year old investment banker or (in Australia), a truck driver in the iron ore mines; and have less influence than a lifestyle columnist for the North Shore Times.
What you mean is that the modern trend is to eschew rhyme, but that is not true. What is true is that better poetry has been written in the last 150 years (since Hopkins or so) than in the centuries before, I mean in the English language, and much of this has eschewed rhyme. But the same is true of any other feat of human endeavour, such as athletics, cricket, or mathematics.
Whether English is suited for rhyme is a separate and longer discussion.

Coming to your poem, the chief problem is that it's a short, dramatic poem, and the merits or demerits of the drama overshadow any technical virtues of the poem itself. As a poem, I would say that with a few tweaks, it can be quite a decent poem up until 'campus', but you need to change the trajectory of the story after that to avoid aforementioned drama. The suicide is S2 is too sudden, and too melodramatic to be credible, given the sparse buildup and insufficient lack of motive therefrom.
If you want to stick to the suicide, then you need to provide more insights into the mind of the red haired guy, so that a credible motive can be discerned.

Best

The poetry establishment written about in a 2012 Harper's poetry slam followed by one in Boston Review details how certain influentials control output to the extent that almost all poetry magazines eschew brevity, levity and social comment, concentrating almost entirely on craftsmanship at the expense of content so that, as one critic noted, readers have little choice but to put up with beautiful but empty poems. This rigidity is propagated by MFA programs and the telling fact that poetry contest judges seem always to be poets themselves. This reflects an emphasis on production with no particular concern for consumers. My poems please me and are designed to also please readers, an effort involving poems having subjects, often forward  motion and always defined takeaways.

"At present I'm seeking poetry which is to a greater or lesser extent verbally-led, i.e. which foregrounds the patternings and intricacies of language, through which, rather than directly, the poem's message emerges...  This perhaps means "poetical" poems."

Those are a fortnightly's poetry editor's words which effectively rule out all poetic styles not meeting his but not necessarily readers' preferences.

Welcome to the poetry establishment which doesn't much like drama or muscularity either.

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