Somebody has asked a question, and the answer that came back was a single word: "Maybe." The poem never tells us what the question was. That omission works well, because the speaker's complaint is that the answer is so empty it could be a reply to anything. The poem's central idea is that a non-answer is never neutral. "Maybe" sounds gentle, even polite, yet it leaves one person waiting while the other keeps all the power. By the end, hope has stopped being a comfort and become a way of being held in place.
The framing deserves a moment. The heading, "Bai", looks like a casual, texting-style spelling of "bye" (an inference, but a likely one), so the poem opens by promising a goodbye. Beneath it sits «To be decided.», set in guillemets as if lifted from a form or a schedule. It is a cold, administrative phrase to attach to someone's feelings, and it quietly describes the poem's own condition: nothing here will be settled. Even its full stop is a little ironic, a firm closing mark on a phrase about uncertainty.
The shape of the poem acts out the frustration. There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The lines are short and uneven, closer to someone talking, or typing furiously, than to polished verse. "You told me, / Maybe" strands the key word alone on its own line, and the comma after "me" works like a held breath before it arrives. Then come four questions in a row, each longer than the last, climbing a ladder of suspicion. "What does that even mean?" is plain confusion. "Have you not had to time to decide yes or no?" turns practical. "Do you really need more time thinking?" grows sceptical. The final one, "Or is this just some way of filling me with nonexistent hope?", says the unkind thing out loud. Look at where "yes or no" appears: only inside a question, as two answers named but withheld. And "filling" suggests pouring something into an empty container, while "nonexistent" insists nothing is really there. It is hope that has been put in and is absent at once.
After that sprawling run, "Your a bastard." lands like a slammed door: short, flat, unhedged. The slipped spelling of "Your" adds to the sense of something dashed off in anger, though it would be unwise to lean too hard on it. What follows is more interesting than the insult. "But you probably already knew that" drains the anger into tired sarcasm, and it plants the poem's most important verb: "knew." The other person knows what they are, and, as the closing lines say, knew exactly what "Maybe" would do. The speaker is the one in the dark.
That brings the poem back to its opening word. "Maybe" returns alone on its line, as at the start, but now it is the subject of a sentence and receives the poem's only metaphor: it "Was an anchor of hope." The image cuts both ways. An anchor is meant to steady a ship, which sounds reassuring, but it also stops the ship from going anywhere. Hope normally lifts people up. Here it weighs them down. The speaker is moored, unable to leave even though the title says goodbye. The past tense "Was" may hint that they are beginning to see the trick for what it is, but the poem stops before anyone cuts the rope.
The poem's significance lies in how much it gets from so little. There is no elaborate scenery, only ordinary words and one well-chosen image, and that plainness suits a hurt made of everyday language. It takes a word we throw around constantly and shows what it can weigh. It also leaves a point worth carrying away: vagueness can pass for kindness while behaving like control, and a clear "no" might have been the more generous answer.