You could try putting the POD in a __DATA__ section, and then use

use Pod::Text;

my $parser = Pod::Text->new();

$parser->output_fh(*STDOUT);
# or $parser->output_string( \my $out );

$parser->parse_file(*DATA);

__DATA__
= pod
...
[download]

The idea would be that the DATA handle (as opposed to basename $0) is pointing to the properly unpacked source...  (untested, though)

P.S.: the parse_file() method is inherited from Pod::Simple, which means you need a reasonably new version of Pod::Text (older ones didn't subclass Pod::Simple, IIRC).