POE is cooperative multitasking, which means that any part of the program that blocks will halt the whole program. In your case your infinite loop.

I wrote a plugin to handle tailing a file to IRC called POE::Component::IRC::Plugin::FollowTail, it has been shipped in the POE-Component-IRC distribution since version 5.48 and uses POE::Wheel::FollowTail, to non-blockingly tail a file