I want to be able to access any part of the document at any given time.

This seems to be the task for XPath; if you take a few time to learn the basics you could easily use XML::XPath, which should do exactly what you need

Ciao!
--bronto

# Another Perl edition of a song:
# The End, by The Beatles
END {
  $you->take($love) eq $you->make($love) ;
}