From perldoc HTML::Form:

@forms = HTML::Form->parse( $html_document, $base_uri )
@forms = HTML::Form->parse( $response )
      The parse() class method will parse an HTML document
      and build up "HTML::Form" objects for each <form> ele­
      ment found.  If called in scalar context only returns
      the first <form>.  Returns an empty list if there are
      no forms to be found.
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Looks like the first argument should be something containing html.

HTML::Form::parse returns an array in list context or the first form in scalar context. Since you don't have any forms to parse, the first form is undefined, so the answer to q2 is "probably".