Brother Kozz,
You have committed no sins, you're soul is clean. Looking at Text::Parsewords, the reqex is kinda of hairy and doesn't handle the case you've thrown at it. (my numbers)

1. while (length($line)) {
2.   ($quote, $quoted, undef, $unquoted, $delim, undef) =
3.    $line =~ m/^(["'])                 # a $quote
4.             ((?:\\.|(?!\1)[^\\])*)    # and $quoted text
5.                \1                     # followed by the same quote
6.                ([\000-\377]*)         # and the rest
7.               |                       # --OR--
8.               ^((?:\\.|[^\\"'])*?)    # an $unquoted text  
9.               (\Z(?!\n)|(?-x:$delimiter)|(?!^)(?=["']))  
                                       # plus EOL, delimiter, or quote
10.             ([\000-\377]*)           # the rest
11.             /x;                      # extended layout
12. return() unless( $quote || length($unquoted) || length($delim));
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In your case, we fail the first part of the regex (lines 3-5) because we only have a single quote. We also fail the second part of the regex (lines 8-10) because we do start with a quote. Since we've failed the match, $quote is undef, $unquoted is undef and $delim is undef. As a result of them all being undef, an empty list is returned.
Maybe some of the more regex-y inclined brothers can think of a replacement regex. It hurts me just to read the ones like this.
-derby