If, by "something more meaningful" you mean local time, you might want to have a look at Date::Parse and it's tremendously useful str2time() function. Once you have your date string converted to epoch seconds, you can do all sorts of manipulations to it:

use POSIX qw/strftime/;
use Date::Parse;

$ENV{TZ} = "UTC";
my $utc_date_str = "2003-05-06 02:09:00 UTC";
my $epoch_secs = str2time($utc_date_str);
$ENV{TZ} = "Canada/Atlantic"; # set TZ to local
my $local_date_str = strftime("%Y-%m-%d %T %Z", localtime($epoch_secs)
+ );
$ENV{TZ} = "UTC"; # restore TZ to UTC
print "$local_date_str\n";

--
OUTPUT:
2003-05-05 23:09:00 ADT
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You might also want to have a look at the other Date:: modules. Most of them are small and fast (except for Date::Manip :-), and the odds are that no matter what you have to do in terms of date manipulation, there already exists a module to solve your problem (at least in part).