affirmative action

[Achebe]

The

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This changes style as it goes for dramatic effect.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
 
As the ten wheeler left the loading dock, his gaze went from bulking crates
to Alan, come to help.  Alan always came to help, though with the company
only six months longer and dark as he was light. Alan taught him how to open
cartons, slicing sides not tops so layers of product could be quickly removed.  .....the start isn't bad considering the rest of the poem,  but 'dark as he was light' is ominously hackneyed. 
 
Alan told him which supervisors to trust, which to avoid. Alan this, Alan that.
Helpful yes, but he would have learned all that by himself--sooner or later. .....prose. The charitable assumption is that the narrator is speaking from the POV of the red haired youth, in a sad attempt at irony.
While Alan was only a high school grad, he had a bachelor’s degree 
tucked for six years in his bureau. Same pay, same hours for both-  ...'while' and 'only' discredits the neutral POV of the narrator, saved only by the aforementioned charitable assumption
until Alan was promoted and moved elsewhere on the corporate campus.  .....prose
 
Affirmative Action, thought the red-haired college graduate, condemned  .....prose. Also, why is 'thought the...' coming in now? It should've carried on in the same tone as before, with the implied assumption that the narrator was speaking from the POV of the subject. Now the foregoing is looking very shaky.
to the same pay, complaints, remedial training and repeated orders.  .....faint sense of irony that's not developed later in the poem. Also, prose.
 
The world wasn’t fair.  ...boring. and prose.
 
With his parents off partying, the darkening house is his.  .....prose
Straightened from bending low to burn his diploma in the fireplace,  ...I'm surprised he didn't burn it when he landed his current job.
his eye catches the elegant chandelier twelve feet from the floor.  .....unnecessary adjective in 'elegant'. also, makes it look like the idea of suicide came upon him all of a sudden. What caused said person to snap isn't clear, which is why the poem fails as drama.
Check living room doors, assure they’re locked. .....
Chandelier tight to the ceiling? Knot at its base double tied?  .....
Four-foot rope moving smoothly through the cylinder of eight careful turns? 
Looped over, around neck, pulled snug? Feet square on step ladder?
A quick one-footed shove, ladder clattering to the floor,
its splayed legs collapsing with an unheard wooden bang.  ....not bad from 'chandelier' to 'bang', compared to the rest of the poem, but it's still a done to the death -pun intended - description of a cliched suicide
The body jerks with a lifelike twitch just strong enough to prompt
a gentle chorus of faint tinkling from the fixture's crystal pendants.  ....'gentle' unnecessary
 
Outside, as if impelled by Wagnerian opera, a car’s demanding horn mocks the end,  ..... prose. and how does it mock?
its swerving headlights briefly sweeping away living room shadows, signaling a curtain's  .....the possessive pronoun suggest that the car's horn has headlights. Also.....prose
closing on an empty life. .....'empty' - again, the neutral POV is discredited. Given that the guy went to college, has a job, parents rich enough to party (how frigging old is he??), the emptiness is more juvenile angst than reality. Unless other facts have been withheld. Which they have, because apparently this poem is one in a series (nice excuse!)
 
Alan is the only company representative at the small funeral. He had sent a modest bouquet
with an awkwardly-written note, and now speaks softly to the guilt-ridden, broken parents.  .....Weak attempt at irony ('who should be guilt-ridden here?').
 
Affirmative Action

It is possible to write out any piece of prose as a poem with line breaks. English pronunciation follows a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, so anyone can make anything 'sound' like a poem.
But the poem above is too, too wordy to qualify as as a poem.
Also, the central premise is laughable. Guy doesn't get promoted in a dead end job, sees his black colleague move ahead, kills self. The characters haven't been fleshed out in any level of detail required for the reader to empathise.

Someone seems unaccustomed to non-personal stories not Instagram slices of life, aka selfies. Given that poor souls often enough do themselves in because of poor grades or lost girlfriends, this fellow, still doing grunt work six years after college, reasonably offed himself. Noted also complaints about the work being too dramatic, a weird reaction, given that a norm in contemporary poetry is the lack of any emotion other than a kind of  self-centered wooziness.

Guys also kill puppies for fun.
Note my point about the central problem being that the reader is unable to empathise because at the end of the day your poem seems to be about one weird fuck. Why bother giving a motive at all then? 
Still doing grunt work after college is no more reason to off self than Brazil's loss to France in 1998. The motive in such cases is more complex, and often underachievement at work is symptomatic of broader failures in life. For the drama to be convincing, and there is only drama in this poem, a more complex motive needs to be supplied or hinted at for credibility.
Also, in response to your ad hominem, someone seems unable to write anything other than doggerel. Clue - its you.