You are not running the print within the foreach loop. So, once out of the foreach loop, $_ becomes whatever is coming from the diamond operator (which is typically the file stated on the command line).
If you run the print within the foreach loop it will print almost exactly what you think.
I say almost because you are chopping the last character from (for) each of those monks :-). If you want to get rid of newlines - which is not necessary in this case - use chomp instead of chop.