Embedding declarative code into regular Perl

It's always when trying to code something that I have the best ideas. So far I've been considering embedding Perl into declarative structures as kind of a one-way street, but it would be useful to close the loop. The point where I realized this was in building a bit of code that could benefit from a state machine.

Well, my current thinking had been that the state machine would be declared out in the tree somewhere, and the Perl code would just call it. That's kind of rigid, though. Wouldn't it be nice to get something like this?

my @tables = $^content->find('table');
my @rows = $tables[1]->find('tr');

declare state-machine process (start=off)
  off {
    => on if $^next->as_HTML =~ something;
  }
  on {
    something
    => off;
  }

$^process->iterate(@rows);

Isn't that neat? And put it together with a "perl mode" that effectively treats the entire file as a do { ... }, and you have a true declarative framework that would be useful without necessarily being in control.