Five short lines, and hardly a word of decoration. Bai gives us a time, a person, a wish and a command, and the poem is the distance between the first line and the last. It opens with something close to a confession, "It's Midnight and I'm thinking of you", and ends with something close to a tantrum: "And let me sleep." What happens in between is the real subject. The speaker wants rest, and memory won't allow it. The central idea is that we don't choose when to remember. Memories turn up uninvited, and the effort to push them away only proves how strong they are.
The first line is plain and quiet. Its grammar is a calm statement of fact, with no exclamation and no dramatic vocabulary. The capital M on "Midnight" is a small, interesting choice, because it makes the hour feel like a place or a character, something the speaker is stuck inside. The title drops the apostrophe in "Its Midnight" while the poem's first line keeps it, which gives the whole thing the look of something written quickly, perhaps in the very state it describes. That is a guess from the text, not a fact. The "(2)" suggests the poem may belong to a series, though nothing in the poem confirms this. We have only the name Bai and no date, so the poem has to stand on its own, and it can.
The second and third lines carry the poem's most interesting trick. "I wish I could sleep" has no punctuation at the end, and "Stop pounding my head with our memories" crashes straight in. The wish is never allowed to finish its own sentence. The grammar enacts the problem: the speaker can't complete one calm thought before the memories interrupt. The verb "pounding" turns remembering into something physical and almost violent, like a headache, a drum, or a fist on a door. The memories are no longer something the speaker has but something done to them. Notice, too, the word "our". Even now, with the relationship apparently in the past, the memories are shared property, and the speaker can't claim them alone or throw them out.
Then comes the shortest line, "Just shut up,". The language drops from reflective to blunt, and the sound changes with it. The poem's harsh, stopping consonants cluster here and in the line before: "Stop", "pounding", "Just", "shut up". Against them, the soft, drawn-out vowel of "sleep" sounds like exactly what the speaker cannot have. The line lengths do similar work. Line three is the longest and fullest, as if the memories are at their loudest. Then the lines shrink to three syllables, then four, like someone running out of energy. "Just" adds impatience, the tone of a person who is tired and has said this many times before. It is also ambiguous who is being addressed. It could be the memories, the speaker's own mind, or even the absent "you". The poem never settles this, and the uncertainty suits a state in which thought and person blur together.
There is no conventional end rhyme, but the poem has its own echo. "Sleep" appears in line two and again in the last line, framing the middle like a pair of bookends. The echo shows how much has changed. The first time, it is a wish ("I wish I could sleep"), with the conditional "could" admitting that sleep is out of reach. The second time, it is a demand ("let me sleep"), and the phrase "let me" reveals the speaker's helplessness. To say "let me" is to admit that someone or something else holds the power. The speaker is ordering around an enemy that clearly isn't listening.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves out. The speaker never says "love", "miss" or "heart", and we aren't told what happened to the person, whether the relationship ended or the distance is of another kind. Feeling is shown through its effects: exhaustion, irritation, a mind that won't obey. There is a quiet irony in it as well. The speaker begs for sleep in words written wide awake, so the poem is itself a product of the sleeplessness it complains about. Anger here seems to be doing the work of grief, and in five lines it makes a very ordinary midnight feel unbearably familiar.