Your while loop looks at one line at a time but your text says "synopsis (multi line)" ... D'oh! What I mean is that the XML object data spans serveral lines between the opening and closing tags. It's not a <tag text="blah blah blah"></tag> but more of a

<tag name="stuff">
blah
blah
blah
</tag>
[download]

Even if you are disconnected from the net you must have some modules installed, maybe you can have a look around and see if someone else got a useful module installed.
From instmodsh:

CPAN::Meta
CPAN::Meta::Requirements
CPAN::Meta::YAML
Crypt::Blowfish_PP
ExtUtils::CBuilder
File::SearchPath
IPC::Cmd
JMX::JMX4Perl
JSON::PP
Locale::Maketext::Simple
Module::Build
Module::CoreList
Module::Load
Module::Load::Conditional
Module::Metadata
Params::Check
Parse::CPAN::Meta
Perl
Perl::OSType
Term::Clui
Term::ShellUI
Term::Size
Test::Simple
check_postgres
parent
version
[download]

If not, let's hope the files are small enough to fit in memory
I'm iffy to the concept of slurping and generally avoid it due to all the warnings that come with it. The files get anywhere from 3-5MB on a 2GB system with nagios running. Don't know if that's "small" enough.